Hardly anyone has an honest opinion about anything of importance that wasn’t craftily pre-packaged and handed to them by someone else whose job it is to craft public opinion. The intention of the media is to present the illusion of impartially informing, all the while pandering to prejudice and ignorance in order to persuade to a particular point of view. Dateline’s presentation of the Watchtower’s child abuse issue was a case study in the black art of media propaganda.
From the very beginning of the presentation Dateline was intent on giving the public a negative impression of Jehovah’s Witnesses by portraying us all as oddball crackpots whose religion revolves around the doctrine that we don’t celebrate birthdays and that all non-believers are possessed by the Devil and that we want them all to die. If the programmers had wanted to they could have, for example, highlighted the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses are known throughout the world for our peculiar beliefs that war and killing are wrong and that thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses have gone to prison rather than violate the law of Christ. Obviously, the media mind-control apparatus had no interest in presenting the viewers with an accurate picture of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The most shocking and disgusting aspect of the Dateline program, in my opinion, was the airing of a snippet of a private conversation that was recorded without the victim’s knowledge. Such underhanded smear tactics should be offensive to all people. The government, for instance, has to get a court order to tap into private phone conversations of suspected criminals, because in a nation that ostensibly values personal freedoms it is generally recognized that people should have the freedom not to have their private conversations taped without their knowledge and played back in order to vilify or entrap them. Not only did Bill Bowen reveal himself to be the lowest sort of slithering weasel who was willing to violate all accepted standards of ethical behavior in that regard, when he used his position as a trusted elder calling Bethel about a confidential case in order to gather damning information, the Dateline producers were all too willing to abuse their power by crossing that boundary as well.
Probably the most significant aspect of the Dateline program is the influence of apostates upon the production. The Armageddon illustration from the Watchtower’s brochure of horrified people falling into a crevice was obviously supplied to the Dateline producers by apostate JWs in order to inflame public opinion. And the absurd spin on disfellowshipping was absolutely ridiculous. First, the show presents disfellowshipping as a fate worse than death in order to outrage people that the abuse victim was disfellowshipped. But, later, the program admits that child abusers were kicked out also, but that they were later welcomed back. “How dare they extend mercy!” So, as apostates are prone to do, both sides of the issue are used in an accusation, whereby disfellowshipping is portrayed as an atrocity, and not disfelowshipping or reinstatement is also presented as an outrage. It’s a classic apostate technique that is constantly demonstrated in this forum.
The greatest disservice of Dateline propaganda is the way viewers were left with the suggestion that the next time Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on their door that one of them is probably there to rape their child. Unquestionably, the Watchtower has a child abuse problem. No doubt the Society wishes it had handled things differently. But, the most outrageous aspect of the Dateline production was that the child abuse victims were shamelessly victimized again by those whose obvious intent is to exploit their unfortunate situation in order to persuade the public not to listen to our message the next time we call.
/ You Know