Retraction of the month There are retractions, and then there are Retractions. Weblog has attempted to stay away from the Gary Condit- Chandra Levy story, excepting one link to a column about how Condit’s religion shaped his politics. There have been other religion angles to the story, of course, but with as much coverage as this case has received elsewhere in the media, there’s probably no angle that hasn’t been written. Still, Weblog was pushed over the edge upon reading an article in Saturday’s Washington Post: the Pentecostal minister who made front-page news with accusations that his teenage daughter had an affair with Condit now says the story is utterly false. “I never met the congressman who’s involved in all of this,” said a statement by his daughter. Either the minister-gardener (who has worked for the Levys) was lying then or he’s lying now. Clearly the Post and other publications headlined the man’s occupation as a minister rather than as the Levys’ gardener to add credibility to the claim. But now it’s not just Otis Thomas’s reputation that will suffer; this will reflect badly on ministers in general.
Speaking of retractions … The folks over at the MereLewis e-mail list are clamoring for a retraction from Weblog over its recent coverage of The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “Holy War in the Shadowlands.” “The secularization of Narnia was not the real story the Chronicle was pursuing, contrary to [Weblog’s] account,” writes Seattle Pacific University’s John West. Very well, then. Consider it retracted. The Chronicle was writing about the battle for the legacy of C.S. Lewis, but the article was reportedly initiated by the magazine’s interest in Kathryn Lindskoog’s latest screed against the Lewis estate than by the media frenzy over rumors that Narnia would be secularized.
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