Paul Wilson's blog

Anti-American Venezuelan dictator and oil strongman Hugo Chavez was rushed to the hospital on September 29, apparently because of kidney problems. He was quick to downplay any reports of serious illness, which should be a comfort to his friends at the networks.

Chavez, a socialist, has long gotten a pass from ABC, CBS and NBC for anti-American rhetoric like calling President Bush a "devil" and predicting: "The United States empire is on its way down and it will be finished in the near future."

Given the obscurity in which her new OWN network is languishing, maybe Oprah didn't think anyone would notice her bad judgment. Winfrey, the former daytime talk show queen, has decided to honor Dan Savage for his anti-bullying work. Savage is a sex-advice columnist and gay activist known for nasty scatological attacks on social conservatives or anyone who disagrees with him.

In her O Wow! List, which lists 15 "dreamers, doers and thinkers" whose "breakthrough ideas took our breath away this year," Oprah touted Savage as a "crusader against gay bullying" - neglecting to mention Savage's own incendiary rhetoric and bullying comments.

During 2009 and 2010, liberal commentators and even politicians made a point of bashing conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham for allowing gold companies to advertise on their shows, arguing that conservatives and gold companies cynically colluded to deceive viewers into buying bad investments. The recent spike in gold prices seems to prove that the conservative commentators were right after all.

Gold prices topped $1,900 an ounce on August 22. The price of gold rose over 400 dollars since the beginning of this year, up from $1,421.40 per ounce since January 1st, 2011, and has rapidly risen over the past two months. The price of gold was $854.60 per ounce at the start of the Obama administration. In other words, gold prices have more than doubled since the beginning of the Obama administration.

The major news networks love 9/11 stories. But there's one 9/11 story they won't touch: the exclusion of any religious participation from the Ground Zero memorial service during the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Mayor Bloomberg has vetoed the presence of religious speakers at the site of Ground Zero during the memorial ceremony on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, provoking a firestorm of criticism among religious leaders. But the three mainstream news networks - ABC, CBS, and NBC - have completely ignored the story.

Arson, destruction, thievery, beatings and even murder – they’re the inevitable reaction to increased college tuition fees?

To hear the broadcast news networks spin the violence and looting convulsing English cities in August, the riots were clashes between the “haves and the have-nots” (a term used by NBC reporter Martin Fletcher) in British society. According to the networks, an oppressed minority unleashed pent-up rage against a conservative government hell-bent on cutting government spending and creating economic inequality in the process.  

Note to TV networks: Don't even think about downsizing the disproportionate airtime you give gay characters and issues. The bean-counters at GLAAD are watching.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), in its fifth annual "Network Responsibility Index," recently ranked 15 networks based on their inclusion of LGBT characters on original primetime shows that aired nationally.

Perhaps CNN stands for the Closeted News Network. No, that doesn't work. There's nothing closeted about CNN's clear advocacy for homosexual causes.

A Culture and Media Institute analysis of 239 programs aired on CNN from the period June 15 to July 15 revealed that CNN quoted or interviewed nearly four times the number of gay-agenda supporters as critics.

Jason Horowitz's July 6 piece in the Style section of the Washington Post, "Faith & Politics," was a continuation of the mainstream media's crusade against Michele Bachmann and her family. Half anthropology report from the darkest Midwest, half political hit-piece, Horowitz's article sniped at the Bachmanns' opposition to homosexuality and their strong Lutheran faith.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) apparently thinks itself qualified to judge how religious a college is. So far in 2011, the NLRB declared two Catholic colleges not Catholic enough to be exempt from federal labor law.

This controversial labor union attack on Manhattan College and Xavier University has gone virtually unnoticed by the national news media. The Washington Times was the only major newspaper to mention this assault on religious freedom. According to Nexis searches, none of the broadcast networks reported the story, nor have the other major newspapers. The Washington Times piece was an op-ed from Patrick J. Reilly, the President of the Cardinal Newman Society, criticizing the "assault" on Catholic colleges.