Over the last week, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has been everywhere from the Huffington Post to NPR using a titillating tale of Glenn Beck and an old Mormon prophecy about the US Constitution “hanging by a thread” to promote his new book.
At HuffPo, Milbank made the dramatic (if overstated) claim that Beck was using the nineteenth-century “White Horse Prophecy” to send a “coded message to the nation’s six million Mormons.”
But how did Dana Milkbank decode the secret coded language of Mormonism? Does Milbank have “Mo-Dar” (which is like gay-dar, but for LDS folks)?
Or does he read RD? After all, we reported the story of Beck and the White Horse Prophecy here in October 2009. And again here in May 2010.
I picked up a copy of Milbank’s Tears of a Clown to check his sources. And there are none. No footnotes. Only a thank you to his research assistant Emily who “spent hours combing the Web and transcribing Beck oddities and ironies.”
Ah, such are the wages of day-to-day-in-the-trenches religion reporting. Hey, Dana, next time, how about you hook a sister up with a footnote, or a hotlink?
