A lesson learned from the movie “There Will Be Blood.”

The film portrays a relationship between an oil man, a preacher, and gullible community that caused me to take a second look at the relationship between the local newspaper, churches, and merchants in my home town, Springfield, Illinois.

On Christmas day a couple of years ago, the newspaper printed an unprecedented number of atheist letters to the editor. More than could be counted on one hand. They learned a hard lesson after that.

It’s highly likely that the emotion entrepreneurs sermonized on the unusually high number of atheist letters. The newspaper probably lost a large chunk of circulation and advertisers temporarily because Springfield’s bigoted merchants dominate church donation quotas and use their money as political clout to gain loyalty from charismatic preachers.

Now that they know who their audience is, the Illinois State Journal Register cannot care about objective journalism simply because they need to survive. Yet they continue to call themselves a newspaper. To demonstrate this bias, the following letter was given the portion of the Editorial section reserved for a letters from the newspaper’s own editors.

http://www.sj-r.com/opinions/x180635348/In-My-View-Civil-union-law-is-unnecessary