NB Extra

So a preacher, a comedian, and a scientist walk into a bar...

Okay, I'll spare you that joke, but all of the above comprised Harry Smith's theological roundtable in the second half hour of today's Early Show. The question for Jerry Falwell, Andy Borowitz, and Bill Nye "the Science Guy," was, "Is God mad at us," given all the natural disasters---tsunami, hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides---that have beset the planet since last December.

It's an odd theological panel to have, and a relatively unserious segment given the makeup of the panel. If Smith's intent were to have a theological discussion, he'd have been better served by having perhaps a Catholic priest, Falwell, a Jewish rabbi, and an Islamic imam to showcase theological opinions from those four faiths. Instead the audience was served an odd mishmash of Falwell expounding on Christian doctrine, Bill Nye plugging global warming, and Andy Borowitz jokingly blaming Paris Hilton for flooding in the Northeast.

The free weekly tabloid Washington City Paper recently started a new feature, Service Industry, its purpose, "rating D.C.'s houses of worship." Religious readers, however, may sense a bit of condescension, intended or not, in the notion of rating a church service much like it were a play, concert, or film, especially if the church rated by the City Paper's reviewer seems to give it bad marks for its conservative or traditional Christian theology.

This week's entry, "The Church in the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith Inc." in Anacostia garnered a poor 1.5 stars (out of a 5 possible). The reviewer gave high marks (4 stars) for "congregational fervor" but was non-plussed by the lack of "food for the body" after the service (0 stars) and was not too keen on Deacon Larry Mathis's anti-evolution sermon (1 star) nor the church's teachings forbidding female preachers.

Washington Post columnist Tina Brown today took the opportunity to mark the 80th birthday of Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, with a scathing attack on Harriet Miers.

In, "You've Come a Long Way, Ladies," Brown begins:

The healthiest aspect of the Harriet Miers nomination is that women haven't rallied to her cause. Ten years ago, there would have been a lot of reflexive solidarity about keeping the Sandra Day O'Connor spot on the Supreme Court from reverting to male type. But every female lawyer I've spoken with in the past week skips right past the sisterly support into a rant about Miers's meager qualifications or her abject obeisance to power. The good news is that for women, it seems, Miers's nomination is like the moment for blacks in Hollywood when it was suddenly okay to cast an African American actor as something other than a perfect hero. The Sidney Poitier phase is definitively over.

Last week Time Magazine’s cover story was called The Battle Over Gay Teens and I wrote an article discussing the bias from the writer of the article and also cited examples of where content was intentionally ignored. 

Today I read an article found on The Patriot News website called Gays Win Support On Campus and the article mentions, as its main support, the Time magazine article from last week.

CBSNews.com's blog, Public Eye, has a post today on their Early Show viewer demographics, broken down by half-hour block. They show that two-thirds of the audience are women throughout all four half-hour blocks of the show, but that the first half-hour is younger and has more male viewership.

As such, CBSNews officials admit, they tend to stick the hard news in the first half hour, with features dominating the later half hour blocks, but feel they still leave enough hard news scraps to go around in the news briefings in the other half hours:

The first hour is geared more towards the transitional audience, and the second hour includes programming designed for people who are sticking around.

That doesn't mean people who stay at home only want soft features, says Katie Boyle, a senior producer with the CBS "Early Show." She points out that the "Early Show" runs newsblocks on the hour and half-hour, and says that there is a mix of stories so the same topics aren't covered over and over. "In a two hour morning show you want some variety," she says. And the fact that the proportion of women is slightly higher in the second half of the program, she adds, doesn't mean they don't care about hard news. "Women are watching morning television, period, at the beginning and at the end, when there's hard news and soft features," she says. "They want it all."

Sharyn Alfonsi did a story on “The CBS Evening News” tonight that brought me to tears.  Now, I don’t know whether the intention was to stoke anti-war sentiment, or just to show how children at Fort Benning, Georgia are coping with their parents being deployed to Iraq. 

Frankly, I don’t care, for this was an absolutely heartrending segment that I think all Americans regardless of political leaning should watch.

Jay Rosen of PressThink takes Raleigh, NC News and Observer Executive Editor Melanie Sill to task on her blog for getting it wrong.

On Monday, Lehrer applied both liberal and conservative labels when describing a political stalemate that's been wrenching Germany for a few weeks now: