Anti-Religious Bias

In Tuesday's Washington Post, Tom Hundley of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting gave Post readers a textbook example in biased reporting freighted with loaded language. The target was a predictable bogeyman of secular liberal reporters: the Catholic Church.

Hundley painted the constitutional court battle over a "reproductive health law" in the Philippines as a struggle "pit[ting] the entrenched power of the Roman Catholic establishment against a rising tide of modernization and economic aspiration." You read that right. It's progress and prosperity against repression and Romanism according to Hundley.

Dan Savage really is a disgusting human being.

On Comedy Central’s Colbert Report Monday, the anti-bullying advocate said that Vatican City’s healthcare plan doesn’t include birth control “because altar boys can’t get pregnant” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters readers are well-aware, Bill Maher says some astonishingly stupid things.

He may have actually outdone himself Friday, for on HBO’s Real Time, the host actually said, “I think the Pope’s an atheist” (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

The New York Times may have rebuffed Attorney General Eric Holder’s off-the-record meeting with journalists about leak investigations, but they displayed how they really weren’t angry by burying an actual account of that meeting inside Friday’s paper, while the front page carried stories like “A New Step in Wrestling With the Bra.”

Perhaps the most surprising judgment of what was front page-worthy was an obituary for Father Andrew Greeley, as if he were the Cardinal of Chicago. The Washington Post summed him up well: “an iconoclastic priest and sociologist who irked the Catholic hierarchy by writing best-selling novels that featured churchly misdeeds and graphic sex.” He was also a liberal newspaper columnist. Greeley's “New Deal liberalism” equals newsworthy?

The New Republic has easily demonstrated just how ridiculous The Washington Post's book review of the new Dan Savage is to claim that  “reconciliation is at the heart of everything Savage writes and says.”

In "The Waning Power of Dan Savage," Daniel D'Addario dismisses the new book as "a very public act of self-love." Later, he explained "The nadir of American Savage comes when Savage prints a one-act play called 'Jesus and the Huge A--hole,' about religious objectors to Obamacare."  Jesus swears like a Savage:

NPR could stand for Not Pro-Religion. It’s the taxpayer-subsidized network with the Wiccan-priestess reporter. On Friday’s All Things Considered, NPR promoted a new horror movie in which “it’s not the Devil that’s scary.” Instead, “the religious horror is religion itself.”

NPR is pushing an “atheist’s take on Catholic horror.” Those teachings can be “terrifying.” (Disclaimer: NPR reserves the right to spare Muslims all of these criticisms.) The director’s name is Rodrigo Gudino, and reporter Beth Accomando explained the plot:

Police haven’t pinned responsibility on anyone yet for the alleged “hate crimes” against gays in New York, but “Social Justice Activist” Murray Lipp has already decided who’s to blame for the violence: religion, patriarchal society, and too many straight people.

Come again? 

That’s right.  Writing on the Huffington Post’s “Gay Voices” page, Lipp insisted the blame for violent hate crimes be laid at the door of traditional groups or beliefs he claims “create and fuel homophobia in society.” Catching the crime’s culprits isn’t enough, Lipp protested; it’s time to raze traditional societal structures and rebuild society from the ground up. “Homophobic beliefs drive homophobic conduct,” he opined.

A pro-Israel media watchdog accused "60 Minutes" of anti-Semitism at CBS's shareholders meeting Thursday.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the complaint stemmed from a segment aired April 22, 2012, called "Christians of the Holy Land" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary).

Pope Francis made waves on Wednesday when he said that atheists can do good; but some media headlines jumped on the chance to portray the new pontiff as bucking Church teaching. 

Preaching on Christ’s words that “Whoever is not against us is for us,” Pope Francis emphasized that Christ died to redeem all men, “even atheists,” and insisted we can’t assume non-believers cannot do good.  Such people can do good, he said, and “must,” because of “this commandment at heart: do good and avoid evil.”

The Washington Post made a fool of its corporate self by starting a website called “On Faith” and putting at its head the secularist Sally Quinn. Oh, she claims to be interested by religion – just as King Herod thought Christ’s miracles sounded amusing, like he was a hippie magician like Doug Henning.

In Saturday’s paper, Quinn turned dead serious about sexual assault in the military, even asserting that “sexual assault is part of the military culture.” Naturally, Quinn puts a huge part of the blame on Christians, and the infection of their organizing groups in the military:

In their ongoing effort to attack the Catholic Church, it seems not even something as uncontroversial and routine as the pope canonizing new saints can happen without the liberal media find some way to work in an attack. Witness Claudio Lavanga's May 12 post at NBCNews.com headlined "A saint-making record is also a diplomatic headache for Pope Francis." [h/t Creative Minority Report]

"Pope Francis canonized more than 800 Catholics in Saint Peter’s Square Sunday – the largest number to be elevated to sainthood at once in the history of the Catholic Church," Lavanga noted. But alas, "The choice of some of the new saints was also striking, touching on the already-fragile relationship between Christianity and Islam" because the "new saints included hundreds of laymen from the southern Italian port town of Otranto who were slain in the 15th century by the invading Ottoman Turkish army after they refused to convert to Islam." 

The revelation that the IRS was being used by liberals as a political weapon against conservative groups like the Tea Party makes NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman's 2009 call on the tax agency to investigate Catholic bishops even more chilling.

During an MSNBC November 12, 2009 segment about Catholic bishops' opposition to abortion funding in ObamaCare, Snyderman joined NOW President Terry O'Neill in calling on the IRS to investigate them. (video after the jump)

Bill Maher was at it again Friday.

On his HBO Real Time program, during a discussion about sexual assaults in our armed forces, the host said, "The reason why more rapists go into the military is the same reason why predators go into the Catholic Church: it’s a place they know they can get away with it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC and the Washington Post are happy to join the war on the Boy Scouts, pushing every church in America that sponsors a Scout troop to alter their Bibles for the gay agenda. The Post headline on Saturday was "Poll: Most Americans support lifting ban on gay Boy Scouts."

The pollsters did not ask if Americans would also like ending the "bans" in other American social organizations and faith groups. Why can't avid barbecuers join PETA? Freedom of association -- whoever said that was an American principle?

It sounded like a freedom-of-religion case when a Columbus, Texas high school relay-race team was disqualified from the state track championship because Derrick Hayes pointed heavenward after his team won the race. That would seem odd in a red state like Texas. It turned out that officials were so strict, they warned runners to make no hand gestures after the finish line. Hayes had apparently pointed forward, and then upward, and for that, he was out.

It can be tough to be a student in today’s public schools. Never mind restrictions on the schools. It is becoming impossible to express a socially conservative or Christian viewpoint – as a student. Across the land, everyone is ordered to welcome without a discouraging word any expression of the gay or transgender variety. But try to say the G-word or oppose abortion, and watch someone lower the boom.

Friday’s Washington Post is aggressively pushing for the gay Left’s youth agenda, including a front-page Metro section story on a tiny street protest against the local Boy Scout council: “Among the protesters against the Boy Scouts of America’s ban, few have more to risk than a gay Md. teen,” read the headline above a photo. “Honoring his duty, pursuing equality” was the large headline.

The heroic protagonists of the story were Pascal Tessier, a 16-year-old gay activist who wants to be an Eagle Scout, and his gay brother Lucien, 20, who already earned his Eagle. Reporter Theresa Vargas equated the BSA policy with bullying:

Late last year, NPR already proved its affinity for publicizing a vicious tale where the Virgin Mary is turned into a bitter atheist who denies the divinity of Jesus and hates the Apostles for trying to spread Christianity. But NPR proved it again....on Good Friday.

The news “hook” is the forthcoming Broadway adaptation, a one-woman monologue, set to open on April 22. So NPR obviously timed the piece to tweak the Christians. All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel interviewed the actress, Fiona Shaw, and after he heard her read from this Christian-bashing work in an Irish brogue, he compared Jesus to an Irish Republican Army terrorist leader: 

For a long time now, it’s been apparent to social conservatives that the gay-marriage lobby is not a movement of tolerance. It won’t be satisfied with Supreme Court-imposed homo-nuptials in 50 states. If groups like GLAAD are the rule, they work to ban the social conservatives out of the “respectable” circles in the media, and make “homophobia” a hate crime.

But you can’t make this argument at the Daily Kos, where “LeftHandedMan” responded to this argument with a “GFY” and a rant about how conservatives should all bend over and “fist” each other with spiked gloves:  

On Thursday, Mollie Hemingway of the GetReligion blog pointed out CBS's "major mistake" on the March 31, 2013 edition of Sunday Morning. On the Easter Sunday broadcast, Martha Teichner confused two biblical figures with the same name when she stated that "only one of the Gospels places Mary at the crucifixion, alongside the so-called 'beloved disciple' – possibly John the Baptist." Actually, the prophet was beheaded many months before Jesus' arrest.

During her report, Teichner also spotlighted the Broadway adaptation of Irish author Colm Toibin's novella "The Testament of Mary," which perverts the biblical Mary of Nazareth into an angry woman bitter over her son Jesus' execution and openly disdainful of His followers. [audio available here; video below the jump]

The recent murders of local prosecutors in a north Texas county -- possibly at the hands of white supremacists -- was the news hook for MSNBC's The Cycle to bring  Heidi Beirich of the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on to the April 2 program. In introducing the guest and justifying her expertise, co-host Ari Melber merely described the SPLC as "a group that documents that state of hate groups in America."  [video follows page break; MP3 audio here]

It fell to token conservative co-host S.E. Cupp to remind viewers that SPLC leans to the left and has been criticized by conservatives for "smearing religious and far-right groups and ignoring far-left hate groups." "Shouldn't people be aware of your ideological biases before they take seriously [SPLC's] claims of who they should be afraid of?" Cupp argued. A bemused  Beirich insisted she had to "dispute the notion of the question on its premise," adding that:

ABC wasn’t the only network to turn to atheist on Easter morning for some acidulous religion-bashing. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry turned to feminist Katha Pollitt to rip apart religions as “all invented by men for men” to repress women.

That came after Harris-Perry somehow compared the morality of abortion as a less weighty matter than access to water in the Third World. Once again, like last weekend, Harris-Perry referred to unborn babies as “things,” in this case “things in your uterus” that you can evacuate: 

As religious people are bludgeoned with secular views by America's media practically 24/7, it would be nice if they could be given a break on their holiest days.

George Stephanopoulos clearly doesn't feel that way for on Easter Sunday he invited an atheist on ABC's This Week to join a panel discussion about - wait for it! - religion (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While Jim Carrey was calling gun owners "motherf--kers," Jason Biggs spent Holy Week attacking the Pope.

The Five's Greg Gutfeld took them both on Friday marvelously saying, "Our country is great because washed up comics have the right to suck" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Liberals who demand church-state separation would pitch a fit if a public school decided to perform a play that reverently told stories of the Old Testament, whether it was the story of creation, the story of Noah, or Moses, or Joseph and his brothers.

But somehow, if a public school decides to put on a play mocking God and the Old Testament, that is not a church-state violation. The separation police don’t want religious (or atheist) minorities to face religious indoctrination in a public school. But anti-religious indoctrination mocking the Judeo-Christian majority is a glorious festival of free speech.