Extreme sport, extreme distortion

I’ve documented over the last 25 years how some news media go to great lengths to edit out the spiritual, but ABC News last night set a new world record.

The Associated Press noted Nik Wallenda’s expressions of faith as he walked yesterday along a quarter-mile stretch of two-inch steel cable, more than a quarter-mile above the ground: “Wallenda didn’t wear a harness and stepped slowly and steady throughout, murmuring prayers to Jesus almost constantly along the way.”

AFP, the French equivalent of AP, reported that Wallenda “repeatedly thanked Jesus during the walk, and says his Christian faith is important: ‘What I get from my Christian faith is that I know where I’m going to go when I die. And that affects my business, because what I do is risky, and if I die, I have peace,’ he said.”

The British agency Reuters noted, “Wallenda could be heard praying almost constantly during the walk, murmuring ‘Thank you, Jesus.’”

Fox News reported Wallenda “murmuring prayers to Jesus almost constantly along the way.”

Congratulations to all those outfits for their honest reporting. But on the ABC News website, Geetika Rudra’s story had zero, nothing, nada on Wallenda’s Christ-centered comments. Rudra or her editors evidently decided that the question of whether Wallenda was crossing the Grand Canyon or the Little Colorado River Gorge was more crucial to the story than Wallenda’s expressed reasons for defying death.

Might as well have left out the tightrope.

See Zachary Abate’s “Nik Wallenda walks by faith.”