Faithful America and CREDO Action Speak Out Against Propaganda on Alabama Public Television
Last week, faith leaders delivered petitions signed by 114,000 people to Alabama Pubic Television headquarters in Birmingham objecting to the station’s plan to air right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton’s propagandic documentary series about America’s founding.
The petitions were coordinated by Faithful America and Credo Action and delivered by local pastors Revs. Darryl Kiehl and Shannon Webster as well as Southern Poverty Law Center Senior Fellow Mark Potok.
Watch the delivery:
Barton is founder and president of WallBuilders, which describes itself as “an organization dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes.” But, as Potok described, Barton is not a historian; he’s “an extremist of the radical right,” who “says that gay people should be sent to prison [and] claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated American government at all levels.”
The Alabama Educational Television Commission’s campaign to get Barton’s highly inaccurate documentary on the air has begun to resemble an ideological purge — APT fired two executives after they refused to broadcast the series. The majority of the APT’s private-sector funding board resigned in protest.
“As a Christian and a pastor,” Rev. Kiehl said at delivery, “I have always trusted public television as a source of reliable information about history and culture. I’m disappointed that APT is even considering broadcasting David Barton’s slanted, misinformed history of America. Since our nation’s founding, Christians have fought for justice, equality and the common good, and Barton’s work appears to ignore that. His revisionist history is unworthy of public television.”