| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
He Went to Prison?
00:03:08
|
|
| And you wrote an op-ed. | |
| Where did it run first? | |
| Where does an op-ed start? | |
| Well, you know, every media could run an op-ed, you know, from the New York Times on down. | |
| We ran it on Charisma News, charismanews.com. | |
| It was in my voice, of course. | |
| And then I also did a podcast. | |
| It's called The Strang Report. | |
| It's on the Charisma Podcast Network. | |
| And I basically read it on the podcast and ad-libbed a little bit. | |
| But I saw what was happening, Jim, and I was waiting for your ministry to issue a statement because, you know, what was going on all over the internet, the internet just exploded with it. | |
| And it was, you know, they drug out all this ancient history, you know, that terrible injustice that you went through in the 1980s at PTL, where you ended up in prison. | |
| And, you know, they said, this guy went to prison. | |
| And, you know, they don't tell the whole story on how you got out and how Alan Dertzewitz, the famous lawyer, defended you and how it was a terrible injustice. | |
| They don't tell the story about how you started over. | |
| And then they took this comment that you made about COVID-19 and about silver. | |
| And they blew it all out of proportion. | |
| And I tracked down the clip. | |
| I didn't happen to see the program that day. | |
| It was on February 12th, I found out. | |
| And they blew it all out of proportion. | |
| It was like, this guy went to prison for doing bad things and now he's doing it again. | |
| I mean, that was the storyline, and it wasn't true. | |
| You know, it's probably not my place to speculate on whether or not you should have talked about it. | |
| But you did, you know, they said that you made it sound like if you're dying of COVID-19, use this product that you can only get here and it will make you well. | |
| You didn't say anything close to that. | |
| In fact, the lady that was on your show, a doctor who I don't personally know, said it hadn't been tested for COVID-19. | |
| Anybody with two eyes could see that. | |
| Yet they made this big deal about it. | |
| And all I did was set the record straight. | |
| That's all. | |
| I didn't even really come to your defense. | |
| In fact, knowing you, I probably rehashed some of the past that you would rather be forgotten. | |
| And if I was in your position, I think I'd feel exactly the same way. | |
| But the problem is that we don't have a whole lot of fair reporting in this country. | |
| We just don't. | |
| I was trained in the journalism business. | |
| I went to the University of Florida and got a journalism degree and worked in the newspaper industry at the early part of my career. | |
| And I could see back then what was happening. | |
| And the media was getting very, very liberal back then. | |
| And they did not like religion back then. | |
| I mean, I was involved in a big church in Orlando and they were always taking pot shots at really any big church in town. | |
|
Spiritual Journalism Challenges
00:01:52
|
|
| And, you know, that was in a very different era. | |
| In fact, when I worked for the Orlando Sentinel, Gerald Ford was president. | |
| So that tells you how long ago it was. | |
| And it's gotten much, much worse. | |
| And, you know, we're Christian journalists. | |
| We deal mostly with spiritual things. | |
| We're much more interested in a way if there's a revival in Toronto or the late Reinhardt Bonke had a million people in his crusade in Africa than we are on the latest NFL football draft, which is happening. | |
| Partly because other media don't cover that. | |
| And the Lord is doing a lot. | |
| The Holy Spirit is doing a lot around the world. | |
| The church is growing. | |
| But boy, if you watch the media, it's just a bunch of religious nuts that are off, you know, singing and shouting and praising the Lord and totally irrelevant and to be feared. | |
| And they're watching all the time to just see anything they can blow out of proportion. | |
| And if they can't blow something out of proportion, they make something up or just make some. | |
| I mean, like this whole thing with Franklin Graham in New York. | |
| What is wrong with going to New York and helping with the COVID-19? | |
| Well, the people who don't like us don't like our theology. | |
| They don't like his theology, and they're making a big deal about it. | |
| And Franklin did nothing wrong. | |
| But there's a spiritual war. | |
| I write about this in Charisma magazine, of course, and in the several books I've written. | |
| In fact, I was able to be on secular media and talk about spiritual warfare because I believe what is happening in our country is not so political, although it's got a political aspect to it, of course. | |