Newsweek, the venerable but flailing eighty-year old news magazine, until recently was a part of the IAC media and online dating empire. IAC owns The Daily Beast and websites including Match.com and Dictionary.com. Last summer, IAC sold Newsweek to a company called IBT, which publishes the International Business Times.
In reports first from The Guardian and later from Gawker late last week, and in a stunningly in-depth report from Mother Jones, published just this morning, it seems clear Newsweek’s new owners, IBT, are linked to a Christian Evangelical cult-like group run by Korean Christian David Jang, that sounds somewhat similar to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
(Moon’s cult owns the far-right wing Washington Times, whose claim to fame was its most popular devoted duly reader: Ronald Reagan.)
IBT’s owners are, according to reports, linked to David Jang, the Korean Christian sect leader who founded Olivet University in San Francisco and who runs a multi-million dollar media empire.
Gawker, calling IBT “a soulless content farm controlled, in part, by right-wing Moonie leader David Jang,” writes:
In a lengthy profile of IBT founder Johnathan Davis, Guardian reporter Jon Swaine reveals that the 31-year-old entrepreneur believes in redeeming gay people, too:
In a Facebook post in February 2013, Davis described as “shockingly accurate†an op-ed article written by Christopher Doyle, the director of the International Healing Foundation (IHF), which works to convert gay people. Davis said it “cuts like a hot knife through a buttery block of lies.â€
In the Christian Post article Davis linked to, ex-gay activist Christopher Boyle argues that “there is a good chance a person will experience SSAâ€â€”same-sex attraction—if that person experiences “sexual initiation and/or sexual abuse†as a child, and that “activists in the psychological and counseling communities†repeatedly silence researchers who suggest that homosexuality is harmful and can be cured. (Both assertions have been repeatedly debunked.)
But in today’s Mother Jones exposé, “Who’s Behind Newsweek?,” Ben Dooley reports on a much more intricate network of businesses that uses students from Olivet University — officially known as Olivet Theological College & Seminary — as low-cost labor to fuel the massive media empire.
But its goal seems to be Christian cultish ministry, known as The Community, not journalism.
Dooley reports that David Jang, the man seemingly linked to IBT’s owners, and thus, Newsweek, “sees Community-affiliated media organizations, including IBT, as an essential part of his mission to build the kingdom of God on Earth. He has said that media companies affiliated with the Community are part of a new Noah’s ark designed to save the world from a biblical flood of information.”
And Dooley adds:
Jang’s sermons make it clear that he views all of the Community’s enterprises as serving the same overall purpose: “We are one, but we are also independent at the same time,” he said in 2009. “Church as church, company as company, organizations as organizations. But we are all going forward toward the [kingdom of God], and the service in the heaven will be like this. The whole bodies covered with eyes, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy.'”