Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Preying from the Pulpit

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[edit] Merge

Merge to the FBC, Hammond article. It has little wider relevance outside of FBC and its people. writes Just zis Guy you know?. My response: This article is already merged in 3 places. It appeared in Hyles personal page, his Church page, and his College page. Vivaldi (talk) 11:12, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Ironically, the Wikipedia article "Preying from the Pulpit" actually already existed within other Wikipedia articles prior to the creation of the seperate article, that is, it was "merged" within the articles before someone (Arbusto) extracted it to create this new article. The article's creation appears to me to have been an attempt to defy my own efforts to call its reliability into question.
"Preying from the Pulpit" was a 6-part report apparently presented by the CBS Eyewitness News Team of Channel 2 (actually, the investigator was Vince Wade, who now makes TV documentaries) in Detroit, Michigan, in 1993. In that same year, that TV station was purchased by New World Communications. By the end of the next year, the station had switched its affiliation to FOX. Of special note is the fact that little Channel 2 scooped all the other news stations in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana--the entire nation! In fact, it scooped them so badly, that NO OTHER STATION EVER PICKED UP ON THE STORY! As they say in the news business, "A scoop that lasts more than 24 hours is not a scoop." Safe-to-say, if "Preying from the Pulpit" were a reliable expose of FBCH, it would have attracted more attention than just one insignificant TV station in Detroit. The only attention it received was the fact that someone was publishing sensational claims against a major church and its long-time pastor, not any dark secret proved about the church.
NWI Times made reference to a Detroit news team's report on a few occassions. In one issue, the NWI Times editors stated: "Most of the TV station's allegations are not new and we've looked at some of them before and found them without merit or been unable to determine the truth." NWI Times: "Truth gets lost in uproar of First Baptist story."
Despite the questionable nature of the original broadcast and the questionable nature of how that broadcast came to reside on the personal Webspace of a highly vocal Hyles critic, Arbusto demands that Wikipedia continue linking to it. In fact, he is multiplying the number of occassions in which he mentions it, just so it is embedded throughout Wikipedia. Meanwhile, Jeri Massi, on whose Web space the MP3 copies of the TV broadcast reside, is finding people on the Web who will link to her copies. Pooua 06:39, 5 May 2006 (UTC)