Programme called biased and unfair

Press, 4 July 1983, Page 2

Programme called biased and unfair

A C.B.S. Television “60 Minutes” programme on Protestant church support of guerrillas, screened on TV2’s “Foreign Correspondent” on Saturday evening, was biased and unfair, said the Rev. Angus MacLeod, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, yesterday. When the film, “The Gospel According to Whom?” had been shown in the United States earlier this year, it had “created a storm of protest,” said Mr MacLeod. It had been described by Church leaders as “mixing innuendo, misleading statements, and selective quotes” to buttress charges that some Churches, particularly through the American National Council of Churches and the World

Council of Churches, were supporting violent revolution and Marxist causes. “I can well understand the feelings of outrage it created,” said Mr MacLeod, after seeing the film. “It uses clever television reporting techniques to twist the truth and cheat the viewer,” he said. “It gives a massive preponderance of time to the critics, and then offers the Churches a brief time to prove their innocence.” The film had used photographs of murdered missionaries, Moscow’s Red Square, and Fidel Castro “to induce emotional reactions which the facts do not warrant,” said Mr MacLeod. Of the thousands of churches which supported the two Church organisations, the

only one visited had been a church which sponsored an anti-ecumenical resolution at a Methodist conference. “The resolution was overwhelmingly defeated, but the film hardly mentioned that vital fact,” he said. The W.C.C. had 305 member churches, but the only official interviewed was from one of the few groups that had withdrawn from the organisation. “Out of millions of refugees and poor people helped annually by ecumenical church programmes, not one was interviewed,” said Mr MacLeod. Two ministers of the small Institute of Religion and Democracy, an antiecumenical body, had been interviewed, and their comments, not backed by evidence, had sown suspicions about Church leaders without them being given the chance to reply. “The ordinary viewer, not knowing the background to the film, was being conned by this programme,” said Mr MacLeod. “It served the interests of sensationalism rather than the truth.”