{"id":15138,"date":"2011-04-14T15:00:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T20:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=15138"},"modified":"2011-04-14T15:29:29","modified_gmt":"2011-04-14T20:29:29","slug":"inoculation-for-mormons-behaving-badly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2011\/04\/inoculation-for-mormons-behaving-badly\/","title":{"rendered":"Inoculation for Mormons Behaving Badly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last June Dave Banack discussed the idea<\/a> that LDS Church members should be inoculated for troubling LDS doctrinal and historical issues. I don’t think that idea has been completely explored, but I do think inoculation might be useful in one area where our (i.e., Mormon) sub-culture doesn’t use it: the news.<\/p>\n

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I’ve been told many times by members of the Church that they want to limit what they read, hear and see to that which is “uplifting.” And at least in terms of entertainment, General Authorities have given counsel along those lines. But I don’t understand how that can be extended to the news.<\/p>\n

News is not entertainment. We shouldn’t pick and choose what news we consume based on what news we like. Doing so could easily leave us ignorant or ill-informed of what we should know and even more vulnerable to evil. We do need to know about gangs in our neighborhoods, pedophiles, and even about those con men to prey on LDS Church members \u2014 so that we can take precautions and so we can urge our governments to act as we want them to. In our Mormon sub-culture(s), don’t we deserve the kind of coverage that we get from local newspapers? Would anyone want the local news sources to exclude things just because we find them distasteful?<\/p>\n

It is true that news reports on Mormonism often contain errors or are based on misconceptions, which may be one reason why we should have Mormon news outlets. Mormon news items are also often excluded from most news outlets for not being of interest to the broader community, or because they involve a community outside of the area that the news outlet covers. The rise of the Internet has led a number of Mormon news outlets to develop beyond the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune, which often end up excluding some Mormon news items because they don’t involve Utah. Now we also have outlets like the Mormon Times, Meridian Magazine, LDS Living, The Beehive, Desert Saints and the news efforts of many blogs here on the Bloggernacle. But still, “distasteful” news is often excluded from most of these publications.<\/p>\n

Let me throw out some concrete examples of recent news items that might give some LDS Church members pause:<\/p>\n