Hubbard, at Saint Hill Manor
This afternoon, The Observer‘s Dan Duray published an insightful look at the fact-checking process that journalists go through when they investigate the Church of Scientology. Specifically, he talked with Lawrence Wright and his indefatigable researcher, Lauren Wolf, about what they went through trying to get answers from Scientology’s spokeswoman, Karin Pouw.
And Dan revealed what we told him: that we haven’t heard directly from Pouw since the Debbie Cook lawsuit last February.
Karin, where’s the love?
Also, we were featured in an excellent piece by Ellen Killoran at the International Business Times. Ellen talked to us at length about a lot of different issues that are causing big trouble for the church today.
She also talked to Jason Beghe, resulting in this great exchange…
Scientologists are conditioned to believe that any criticism of the church “is all lies” and that accusers “are angry bitter apostates,” Beghe said. But what about someone like Cruise, who surely cannot ignore the massive amounts of negative press about his relationship with the Church of Scientology?
“Tom Cruise doesn’t want to know,” Beghe said. “The embarrassment, the shame, the wasted life and money — it’s too hard to look at.”
What strikes us about the pieces by Dan Duray and Ellen Killoran is how they show that the media is moving to a new position. Just a few years ago, you wouldn’t get stories this detailed about Scientology without obligatory background paragraphs about “science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard who founded Scientology in this town on that date and today the church says it has 10 billion members, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
In other words, the media is beginning to understand that for the past five years, members of the non-media, like Anonymous, have been way out in front of news organizations and have raised awareness of Scientology and its problems to a remarkable degree.
Stories like this take as given that readers know that Scientology is a controversial celebrity cabal that is in big trouble. And believe us, that is a huge shift.
We can hardly wait to see what tomorrow brings.
PS: We don’t know if this is related or not, but the Bunker is now over 1.1 million pageviews for the month, and of its more than 55,000 unique visitors in January, we get the feeling that a good number of them are journalists. For that we humbly thank our readers and commenters who have been spreading the word.
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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 29, 2013 at 18:20
