South park scientology folge deutsch6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() “The ’Net changed everything and from all accounts has had a major impact on membership,” said Mark Bunker, a TV journalist and longtime anti-Scientology activist. “The simple answer is the Internet,” said Kent, the University of Alberta sociology professor. “Basically that’s the playbook,” Rinder said of the BBC show, “that gets used for every perceived media piece on Scientology.”Īt some point, though, that alleged tactic, which left a trail of gaps in the public’s understanding of Scientology where stories were left on the cutting-room floor or never written at all out of fear, apparently began losing its effectiveness.Įx-Scientologists and experts differ on when exactly they believe the church’s hold on the story of Scientology first started to slip, but they agree on the cause. Scientology’s approach with its critics, he said, is to “silence them by finding out something that they’re seeking to protect that will either cost them their job or the threat of exposure will cause them to back away.” And “of course, there were also legal threats,” Rinder said. “That’s basically the tactic the church uses,” Rinder said. And John Sweeney video’d them and showed them in his Panorama documentary!” “I know the church hired to follow Sweeney, as I was there,” he said. Rinder, a top official in the church at the time of the BBC program, said he was involved in the operation and saw it firsthand. Pouw, the Scientology spokeswoman, did not address specific claims about the BBC show but wrote in her statement: “The Church does not hire private investigators to follow journalists.” “The people involved in the production, from Sweeney and his producer all the way up to the top of the BBC, were investigated.” In 2007 the BBC’s Panorama program began producing a feature, “Scientology and Me.” “The church sent private investigators to follow the BBC’s reporter, John Sweeney,” said Rinder. Rinder, who’s featured in Going Clear, was a senior executive in the church who spent time in its public affairs division before leaving Scientology. Mike Rinder knows about Scientology’s approach to dealing with media criticism from experience. “This is a myth spread by those who produce one-sided hatchet jobs like Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright did, but whine when we exercise free speech by pointing out their bias and shoddy methods.” “Even The Daily Beast knows we do not ‘harass’ the media,” Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw wrote in response to a list of questions submitted by The Daily Beast. The professor related a story about being interviewed for a Canadian television production exploring Scientology when, he said, “one of the shows announcers got cold feet” and it never aired. “I know for a fact that some media individuals, media organizations and even academics were scared off from doing stories about Scientology for fear of being sued or otherwise harassed,” Kent said. Former high-ranking Scientologists and experts on the group describe an approach that relies on the threat of legal action and implied negative consequences to dissuade reporters and entertainers from using the church as a subject. Less extreme examples of Scientology’s reported pressure tactics abound. Internal Scientology documents (revealed in later court documents) described the church’s plan for Cooper, a child of parents killed in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, which was to have her “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard she drops her attacks.” When’s her book The Scandal of Scientology came out in 1971, it drew the church’s attention. ![]() In 1970, Paulette Cooper, a Harvard graduate in comparative religion with a master’s degree in psychology, began publishing work about Scientology. “The history of Scientology’s attempts to scuttle critical stories goes back decades,” said Stephen Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta who has studied and written about the church. Their accounts seem to show the church losing its grip on the public narrative it once aggressively controlled. The new voices in the Scientology debate have both testified to the church’s efforts to silence its critics and, by speaking out, shown the limits of that approach. ![]() That point has been amply made in recent years by top church officials turned whistleblowers, a high-profile book by Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker, and now a lacerating new HBO documentary based on Wright’s exposé. But it’s been tough holding on to that model in the 21st century, a notoriously bad era for powerful institutions in the secret-keeping business. For most of its existence the Church of Scientology grew and prospered by protecting its secrets. ![]()
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