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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Wednesday December 3, 2003

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Religion News Blog (RNB) is published by Apologetics Index. RNB is a religious news service, presented as a weblog that highlights and archives news items and other resources about cults, religious sects, alternative religions, Christian denominations, and related issues.

Who Uses RNB?

RNB’s non-profit news clipping service is used by – among others – Christian apologists, countercult professionals, anticult organizations, teachers, religion professionals, government officials, legal professionals, reporters and other researchers.

In short: RNB is a service that alerts Christian apologetics- and counter-cult professionals – as well as other academic and professional communities – to relevant religion-, apologetics-, human rights-, and ethics news from around the world.

This non-profit service is provided as a research resource, and is intended for educational purposes only.

About Media Reports

When researching religious movements, news reports should not be your only source of information. However, news reports can provide lots of details often missed, dismissed, ignored, or even contradicted by academic researchers, including cult apologists – academics who have gained a reputation for their defence of (and what amounts to PR work for) cults.

Sociologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, in an essay critical of such ‘collaborationism,’ writes:

The moral of recent well-publicized NRM tragedies, such as the Branch Davidians case or the Heaven’s Gate case, as far as reporting and analysis is concerned, is that reading Newsweek, Time, or the New York Times may be just as profitable, or more, as reading scholarly works.

Media reporting in general is quite limited, but investigative reporting by major media, when time and effort are put in, and wire-service reports, are worth at least taking seriously. There are sometimes real errors in the media, but this happens in academic works too.

Reading the scholarly literature, with a few notable and commendable exceptions, does not result in a better understanding of what the Branch Davidians at Waco were all about. The most basic human questions are left unanswered. Newsweek reported quite accurately on who David Koresh really was, and at the same time was severely critical of U.S. government authorities and their outrageous mishandling of the case.

If you were just to rely on Newsweek to understand what happened at Waco, you would reach the conclusion that a group of deranged victims, led by a manipulative madman, was being decimated by superior federal firepower in a senseless and tragic confrontation ignited by the illegal acts of some group members.

Would you miss out on some fine points of scholarly analysis? Not if such analysis consisted of a scholarly defence of indefensible behavior. One way of looking at the Mt. Carmel tragedy is by comparing it to the many tragic confrontations between deranged individuals and insensitive or unaware members of police forces around the world.

The only acceptable defence for David Koresh may be the insanity defence, and this is something you will gather soon enough from the media, which have proven themselves just as accurate in the cases of Krishna Venta, Benjamin Purnell, Aum Shinrikyo, the People’s Temple, the Solar Temple, and Heaven’s Gate.

As we have demonstrated in the case of the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo, sensational media reports never die, they don’t even fade away. They just come back as scholarly data, to be interpreted or euphemized.

Source: Collaborationism and Research Integrity, an essay by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, published in, Part 1, Chapter 1 of Misunderstanding Cults. Editors: Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins. (University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 63,64. An abridged version of Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s paper is posted here.

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