Christians are entering the most important season on the annual calendar, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. But the national media often treat Christianity as a religion that imposes itself too aggressively on American society. To review this hostility, MRC has compiled a new Special Report titled "Secular Snobs: Documenting the National Media's Long-Standing Hostility to Religion."
Even in this campaign, reporters have sneered that conservatives like Rick Santorum are seeking a theocracy like Iran or a Christian version of Sharia law. We've gone all the way back to the MRC's founding in 1987 to remember this bias over the years.
From the executive summary:
In 1993, then-Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf dismissed followers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” A correction came the next day: “There is no factual basis for that statement.” Post ombudsman Joann Byrd later confessed that “several able editors” passed right over that inaccurate dollop of snobbery without recognizing its bias.
Almost 20 years later, that same contempt for religion continues. In fact, in some quarters of the media, religious bigotry has become acceptable.
As part of its 25th anniversary, the Media Research Center has assembled a report revisiting the “objective” media’s hostility to organized religion, especially whenever it leans toward tradition or conservatism. For “Secular Snobs,” the MRC has compiled 45 quotes in six broad categories:
I. Simple-Minded Christianity: The “complex, intellectual ideology” of liberalism is seen as a much more impressive worldview than the old-time “fundamentalist faith” that provides a false sense of security to the less educated American.
II. Republican Theocracy: From Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1980s to Rick Santorum’s campaign in 2012, journalists continually proclaim that conservatives in the Grand Old Party want to impose something “punitive” and “puritanical” on America that is not unlike the ayatollahs in Iran.
III. Liberal Saviors: The media elite’s fear of GOP theocracy is matched by a willingness to entertain – without embarrassment – that leftist icons and Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama bear a striking resemblance to Jesus Christ.
IV: Bible-Thumping Death-Dealers: On hot-button issues like abortion and homosexuality, the religious right has been blamed for encouraging a “climate” of violence, no matter how kind and generous their rhetoric.
V. Rome’s Rottweilers: Journalists report and approve of Vatican City when the Pope is opposing capital punishment or U.S. wars, but when it comes to social issues and church governance, recent pontiffs have been slammed as vicious enforcers of “rigid” orthodoxy.
VI. Religion Slammed by Non-News Media Celebrities: For years, leading entertainers from Bill Maher to Rosie O’Donnell have ridiculed the American majority for how their religious beliefs have led to violence, extremism, and cults of “organized pedophilia.”
The report recommends the news media take religion seriously. If the Post apologized for Weisskopf’s snide “easy to command” verbiage, why does this long-standing journalistic disrespect for religion continue?
