Joe Holley

Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, more popularly known as "Rev. Ike", has gone to his reward. The 74-year old prosperity gospel huckster died on July 29 in Los Angeles.

But in covering the story, the Associated Press and the Washington Post have carelessly tarnished legitimate preachers of the Christian Gospel by association, by lumping in Eikerenkoetter with more biblically orthodox Protestant preachers as an "evangelist."

The July 30 Associated Press obituary, linked here as syndicated at Time.com, directly called "Rev. Ike" an "evangelist," while Joe Holley's July 31 obit at the Washington Post indirectly styled the religious con man as an evangelist by comparing his popularity to Billy Graham:

Claiming more followers during his heyday than any evangelist except Billy Graham, he earned an estimated million dollars a month from listeners across the hemisphere.  

But Holley's obituary makes clear "Rev. Ike" was interested not with saving souls but bringing in the sheaves of greenbacks:

Yesterday fellow NewsBuster Matthew Balan and I wrote about media bias in Reuters and Associated Press reporting on the death of CIA turncoat Philip Agee. Today the Washington Post devoted a 23-paragraph obituary to Agee that was also somewhat lacking.

The Post's Joe Holley did relay to readers that former President George H.W. Bush believes Agee's role in divulging the names of covert operatives resulted in at least one death, that of CIA agent Richard Welch at the hands of Greek terrorists in Athens in December 1975.

Yet while Holley mentioned that in 1987 then-Secretary of State George Schultz denied Agee a passport due to "CIA reports that Mr. Agee was a paid adviser to Cuban intelligence, had trained Nicaraguan security officials and had tried to thwart the U.S. invasion of Grenada," Holley failed to follow the thread any further on Agee's sympathy with the Marxist regimes, particularly Fidel Castro's.

As a January 9 AP obit noted, Agee was a Castro apologist, writing as late as 2003 in the propaganda newspaper Granma defending Castro's crackdowns on pro-democracy activists: