Rolling Stone's ignorance was bad, but it is a bias we all share

Ken Braun: Rolling Stone's ignorance was bad, but it is a bias we all share | MLive.com
The mockery of Rolling Stone’s scandalously fake campus rape story has been well deserved. But one theme - that it’s a case of liberal media bias - is halfway off the mark. It is a case of ignorant bias, to be sure, but it transcends ideology.

When I was 13 years old back in 1981, I read The Satan Seller. The book is the 1972 autobiography of Mike Warnke, a former Satanic high priest who became a Christian comedian and pastor. It is a nightmarish tale of Satanic rapes, drugs, violence and organized crime. The back cover includes favorable newspaper reviews from the New York Times and others.

His personal history allowed Warnke to become the national expert on the occult through the late 1970s and 80s. ABC News reporters Hugh Downs, Barbara Walters and Tom Jarriel of the Emmy-Award winning 20/20 featured Warnke in a half hour report that implied the organized Satanist conspiracy was to blame for numerous criminal and violent incidents in every state. And Warnke was a rock star on the Christian media circuit, with his records and appearances making him a wealthy man.

Demonic forces were both more fascinating and easier to fear when I was in early middle school. But eventually I lost interest, and forgot about Warnke for two decades

As a skeptical 34-year old adult, I stumbled over the book again in 2002. Every fantastically absurd detail came rushing back from memory, tripping critical thinking alarms that weren’t fully formed when I was 13. I knew in an instant it was a fraud, and rushed to the Internet thinking I could expose him if he was still getting away with it.

Of course, I was too late. In 1992, two investigative reporters from the Christian magazine Cornerstone put together an exceptionally researched and devastating takedown of his whole story.

A larger mystery remains. If I had been the same adult back in the 1970s and read Warnke’s tall tale, I would have still spotted the nonsense. And surely there were many like me who did.

So how did Warnke get away with it for 20 years, blowing by the skepticism of award-winning veteran mainstream journalists and legions of other people?

A simple answer: Our vivid imagination for danger is what protected us as we moved from caves to condominiums, but our biology has evolved at a fraction of the pace of our technology. We now exist in an absurd level of comfort for primates still hard-wired to fear imminent starvation and enemy tribes at our doorstep. With far fewer concrete threats, we now fill our heads with abstract worries.