By Jason Collum, AFA Journal staff writer
April 2001 – As the media's bent has grown increasingly liberal, the need for fact-based news from a Christian perspective has grown, too.
In recent years American Family Association has made a strong effort to satisfy that need.
AFA's information outlets include AgapePress, American Family Radio News, AFA Action Alert and AFA Journal.
The newest of these divisions, AgapePress, has grown exponentially in its first year.
"At first it was only a daily news summary, not a press service," editor Jody Brown said. Now, AgapePress has grown to provide not only news summaries to more than 3,500 subscribers, but also news stories for newspapers and radio broadcasting outlets across America.
AgapePress also provides a streaming headline service on more than 130 websites. AFA founder Don Wildmon said there are a number of benefits to websites using this service.
"It brings traffic to those sites," Wildmon said. "Many church sites are static and five months later they've got the same information they had when they were built. This allows them to constantly have new information on their sites."
Brown said AgapePress has hit upon a niche in the news business that fills a need.
"Of the articles we do every day, we try to make one feature an AFA issue--for example, the homosexual agenda, pro-life movement, pornography, and the effect of Internet media on traditional values," Brown said.
AgapePress is working to become a cooperative news service and uses stories produced by writers inside and outside AFA, including articles generated by its media subscribers. One of the goals of AgapePress is to become the Christian version of The Associated Press, acting as a clearinghouse for news from a Christian perspective.
"AgapePress has been a huge help to us," said Warren Smith, publisher of three weekly newspapers in North Carolina, including The Charlotte World. "The fact that Agape Press is daily is helpful to us even if we don't use an AgapePress story. We'll pick up something like what's going on in Michigan, and we'll be motivated to do our own story on how that issue could affect us locally.
"What [AFA and AgapePress] do is important because Christian citizens have a chance to impact policy at the local level that they don't at the national level," Smith said. "At the local level, you can affect changes, like zoning laws to take porn businesses out of the city. Even though they may be small victories, they are victories. And these small victories accumulate."
Smith said his newspapers have received dozens of E-mails and responses as a result of the association with AgapePress.
American Family Radio News
What AgapePress is to print and Internet media, AFR News is to broadcasting. AFR News was created in 1995 to counter the bias in most secular news media.
"It started off with just a few news updates during the day," AFR News Director Fred Jackson said. "We're at the point now where we start hourly newscasts at 4 a.m. weekdays, and the last newscast is at 9 p.m. We also do a full news day on Saturday, and on Sunday we provide Week in Review, with major news stories of the week."
Jackson came to AFA in 1997 after spending 20 years in public broadcasting in Canada. Long before even hearing of AFR News, his goal was to work for a Christian news service that gives the listener no excuse to have to go to the secular media.
"I felt a Christian news service had to have the big events of the day, the train crash, the earthquakes, things like that, but then bring into that, news of specific interest to Christians--church issues, conservative social issues," Jackson said.
AFR News has a staff of eight and each reporter covers specific beats, including abortion, education, pornography, legal issues, youth, churches, finance, the military, politics, and race issues.
AFR News stories often become material for AFA's Action Alert.
Action Alert
Editor Buddy Smith's first Action Alerts in 1998 were distributed to only a handful of E-mail recipients. Since then the number of people receiving Action Alert has grown to about 16,000.
"Initially it was just distributed within the AFA network," Smith said, "letting people know some of these issues needed to be dealt with immediately. We saw how well it worked, and felt taking it outside the network to grassroots America would have a greater impact, and I believe it has."
Alerts, issued as the need arises, focus on varied issues from congressional policies to television advertising. One recent Alert brought to the public's attention a page on Procter & Gamble's web site for teenagers that "contained a lot of pro-homosexual information and a lot of information on birth control, but virtually no information on abstinence," Smith said. Smith made a few phone calls to the company and an Action Alert was issued. That effort led P&G officials to take the offensive material off the site.
AFA Journal
From AFA's beginning, focusing on moral issues has been the job of the AFA Journal, elder statesman of AFA news and information services.
The Journal began in 1978 as the vehicle for informing the public of the work of the National Federation for Decency, original name of American Family Association. The Journal's job was and continues to be to create an awareness of how traditional family values are falling and to motivate readers to take a stand.
The Journal is published monthly and has a circulation of some 350,000.
"It's primarily a magazine that follows cultural trends and issues," Journal News Editor Ed Vitagliano said. "We usually have several items on the homosexual agenda, pornography, pro-life, culture, and religion issues."
Editor Randall Murphree says the Journal's position in the news world is a little different than that of other news magazines.
"I think the Journal is unique among Christian publications," Murphree said. "We're somewhere between a straight news magazine and an editorial newsletter focused on action. We have always been activist-oriented, trying to educate our readers and equip them to take a stand.
"We have always been above board about our angle on the news, always honest that we have an agenda."
Six Journal staff members keep an eye on major newspapers, magazines, and websites to stay up to date on what's going on in America.
It's the Journal's coverage of TV programming that Al Menconi of the West Coast-based Al Menconi Ministries appreciates most.
Menconi, through his ministry and website works to teach parents and spiritual leaders to deal with young people on issues of entertainment from a biblical perspective.
"Don Wildmon took a stand against the TV media when nobody else was doing it intelligently, and I have supported him since they started," Menconi said. 
Christian news online
• American Family Association: www.afa.net
• Agape Press: www.agapepress.org
E-mail: [email protected]
• AFR News: www.afr.net
E-mail: [email protected]
• AFA Journal: afajournal.org
• AFA Action Alert: www.afa.net/activism/action-alerts
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What is a "Christian perspective' on the news?
By Fred Jackson, AFR News Director
The vast majority of people who work in the nation's newsrooms today are graduates of a world education system which has concluded there is no absolute truth.
Christian news approaches journalism from the perspective that the Bible is the source of absolute truth. We then take the events of the day and shine a light on them from that biblical point of view.
For example, when dealing with abortion, most mainstream news agencies see abortion primarily as a women's rights issue. The focus of their stories is whatever threatens a woman's right to choose to end the pregnancy.
In contrast, we come to the story with the conviction that life begins at conception. Therefore, we report with the assumption that aborting a baby is killing a human being.
However, the difference in how we cover stories is not always so apparent. Our initial report on a natural disaster may be similar to mainstream accounts. However, in our follow-up stories we look for angles that secular reporters would likely ignore. These might include how churches are helping their communities recover; or the testimonies of believers who say their tragedy has drawn them closer to the Lord.
