The NewsBusters Weekly Recap: August 4 to 10

Those Nutty Christians

On Tuesday’s "Nightline," co-anchor Martin Bashir filed a report on businessman Tom Monaghan, founder of a Catholic university in Florida and a community that will attempt to embrace traditional Christian values. Bashir regurgitated a two-year-old criticism that the town has "been described as a Catholic Jonestown, a kind of Catholic Iran, where individual rights and liberties are curtailed."

How Hot is it?

The various network news shows have come to this shocking conclusion: It’s summer and it’s hot. Could global warming be to blame? Ann Curry, guest anchoring NBC’s "Nightly News" on Tuesday, speculated, "Record heat and drought in the United States and Europe. New fears tonight that it's all the result of global warming." Harry Smith, over on CBS’s "Early Show," had the same idea. The morning show anchor definitively asserted, "Before we do anything else, there is in fact, global climate change."

You Knew This Was Coming

On last Friday’s edition of "Countdown," MSNBC host Keith Olbermann blamed the Minneapolis bridge collapse on Iraq war spending. Perhaps Keith is becoming a tad too predictable in his criticism? He also claimed that the United States is paying a "deadly price for a brand of American conservatism that hates and demeans government."

A Personal Moment, Courtesy of People Magazine

Finally, "Good Morning America" has a real infatuation with Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and the story that he takes his wife to Wendy’s for their wedding anniversary. On Thursday’s GMA, anchor Diane Sawyer and reporter David Muir also gushed over the fact that the Edwards couple recently renewed their wedding vows.