NBC has apologized for editing the words “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance before Sunday’s U.S. Open broadcast, but some groups are demanding a fuller explanation.
Fans around world watched as Rory McLlroy crushed the field as the 22-year-old from Northern Ireland made history becoming the youngest golfer to win the U.S. Open in almost 90 years. But it was the decision of NBC Sports producers to omit the phrase “under God” during the opening montage of the final round of the golf tournament that squelched the spirit of that victory for many viewers.
Three hours later, NBC announcer Dan Hicks told viewers: “Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out. We’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”
One media advocacy group believes employees responsible for removing the two-word phrase from the piece should be fired — and a legal group describes the act as “selective patriotism.”
“What we’ve finally discovered is that we don’t just have a liberal media, but we have a provably Godless liberal media,” says Dan Gainor, vice president of Business & Culture at the Media Research Center. “When ‘God’ is there, they still remove it.”
Gainor argues that sports programmers have now joined the fray of the anti-God rhetoric in the mainstream media. “It’s astonishing that they would go this far,” he tells OneNewsNow. “And it’s just more proof that not just do you have a liberal news media and a liberal Hollywood, as proven by the recent Ben Shapiro book, but we now can’t even trust sports media.”
MRC calls NBC’s apology pathetic and says employees responsible for the decision should be fired. “I think the PC world that we see existent doesn’t even understand the mistake that they made. So I have my doubts.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law & Justice said the apology was “too little, too late.” He wants to know who at NBC had final approval on the edited piece.
“How far up does this go in approval? And why on earth did they think deleting ‘under God’ would not get the nation’s attention?” he asks. “They didn’t just edit out ‘under God’ once, they did it twice. It was obviously deliberate. Even in the apology they said they had edited it out — that’s their own words that they used.”
The ACLJ attorney says the implied attitude during the editing process is likely what has angered many Americans. “NBC Sports sitting there and saying, ‘Alright, we’re going to show the whole Pledge of Allegiance except ‘under God’ — that’s why people are so upset about it. It’s selective patriotism.”
(Source: Christian Newswire)