The atheist Rock Beyond Belief festival has received a fair amount of press recently, though it has mostly come through a variety of outlets repeating a single\u00a0story originally written by the Religion News Service.<\/p>\n
Kimberly Winston of RNS wrote “Military atheists get ready to ‘rock beyond belief,’<\/a>”\u00a0which, while a noble effort, still largely came across as a press release for the atheists.\u00a0 (By contrast, the ChristianPost had a somewhat more thorough article<\/a>.\u00a0 In full disclosure, the ChristianPost article does cite ChristianFighterPilot.com extensively.)<\/p>\n What Winston failed to disclose in her original story is RNS received a “donation” of $50,000 last year specifically for them to report, and then distribute reports on, atheists and freethinkers.<\/p>\n (It turns out Winston also wrote a story on Rock Beyond Belief around the time of the original donation.\u00a0 As noted at the time, her article\u00a0clearly read like an atheist\u00a0press release<\/a> — and it repeated a variety of factually incorrect statements about the atheist event.)<\/p>\n That RNS grant came from<\/a> the Stiefel Freethought Foundation with the intent <\/em>of funding a wide-reaching media outlet to get “better coverage of [their] movement<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Just a few months earlier, the Stiefel Freethought Foundation also gave the same amount of money<\/a> to (making it the “largest financial sponsor” of) Rock Beyond Belief, without which the event would not have occurred. From the SFF website<\/a>:<\/p>\n SFF donated $50,000 to Religion News Service to bolster its coverage of freethinkers with a series of news, investigations, feature stories and photos.<\/p>\n SFF donated $50,000 to support the Rock Beyond Belief secular festival at Ft. Bragg.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The SFF was founded and is run by Todd Stiefel, who donated $2.5M to fund his new tax-exempt charity.\u00a0 Stiefel is even playing in one of the music acts at the festival he’s funding and essentially advertising through a paid media outlet.<\/p>\n In other words, the military atheist Rock Beyond Belief and its recent press coverage are essentially the work of one (non-military) man.\u00a0 So much for a grass roots uprising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The atheist Rock Beyond Belief festival has received a fair amount of press recently, though it has mostly come through a variety of outlets repeating a single\u00a0story originally written by the Religion News Service. Kimberly Winston of RNS wrote “Military atheists get ready to ‘rock beyond belief,’”\u00a0which, while a noble effort, still largely came across as a press release for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[88,20,1023,2034,10,2035,171,1126,3079,3078],"class_list":["post-16911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-army","tag-atheism","tag-fort-bragg","tag-kimberly-winston","tag-religion","tag-religion-news-service","tag-religious-freedom","tag-rock-beyond-belief","tag-stiefel-freethought-foundation","tag-todd-stiefel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}