Jerry Falwell

CNN's American Morning and Newsroom programs on Thursday brought on Time magazine's Bobby Ghosh to highlight his "Is America Islamophobic?" article and help promote his accusation that "hate speech" and "bigotry" have "come out into the mainstream" during the course of the debate over the proposed New York City mosque near Ground Zero.

During his American Morning appearance, anchor Kiran Chetry hailed Ghosh's article, which is the cover story of the upcoming August 30th issue of Time, as "a very thoughtful piece." Anchor Ali Velshi, who conducted the second interview of the Time deputy international editor, went further than his colleague: "Okay, you're American- Time magazine is required reading....Bobby Ghosh...wrote the Islamophobia piece that I think everybody is going to have to read because if you are in this country, it's part of the dialogue that we are involved in at this point."

But only days earlier, in an August 3 Time.com article about the imam behind the mosque, Ghosh stated that the "last legal hurdle to the proposed Islamic center near the site of the World Trade Center has been removed, but ignorance, bigotry and politics are more formidable obstacles....Criticism [of the mosque] spans the gamut, from the ill-informed anguish of those who mistakenly view Islam as the malevolent force that brought down the towers to the ill-considered opportunism of right-wing politicians who see Islam as an easy target." So the "thoughtful" Time editor whose latest is "required reading" even had the gall to criticize the families and the friends of those who died on 9/11, or who are generally emotionally-touched by the carnage of the attack.

In the latest of a liberal genre of "going undercover" into evangelical Christianity, atheist author Gina Welch submerged herself as a Christian in Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. She wasn't converted, but she did tell Time magazine's Kristi Olofsson that the media coverage is unfair:

The media often portrays evangelicals as brainwashed, simpleminded and angry. My book isn't the story of falling in love with everybody. There were some people who seemed to sit perfectly into the picture that I'd always had of evangelical Christians. For me what was missing from the media portrait was complexity. 

The death of Jerry Falwell affected her, and again she felt the hostility [like this?] didn't capture the whole picture:

During a news brief on the Saturday, May 23, The Early Show, CBS’s Priya David used that famous euphemism of liberals, “woman’s right to choose,” to refer to the legal right to an abortion, as the show gave attention to Liberty University’s recent decision to withdraw recognition of the school’s club for young Democrats. She also incorrectly exaggerated Liberty's action by claiming that the Democratic group "won't be allowed on campus anymore" when in reality, according to the school, the group can still hold meetings, but just cannot use the school's name or money.

On the Monday, May 18, Today show, NBC’s Ann Curry also used the term in a story about President Obama’s speech at Notre Dame, which allowed the pro-choice President to speak despite being a Catholic university.

Below are complete transcripts of the relevant news briefs from the Saturday, May 23, The Early Show, on CBS, and the Monday, May, 18, Today show, on NBC:

Contrary to what was written and said in the liberal media Jerry Falwell held political beliefs that were actually quite "middle of the road" with regard to key cultural questions such as abortion, birth control, school prayer and homosexuality, according to a new biography written by his widow.

"While he opposed abortion, Jerry would have accepted legislation that allowed it in the case of rape, incest or if the mother's life was in danger," Macel Falwell tells readers in her new book "Jerry Falwell: His Life and Legacy." Moreover, Falwell believed the civil rights of homosexuals should be safeguarded, despite harboring moral objections to the homosexual lifestyle, she explains.

The prominent televangelist and evangelical Christian pastor, who co-founded the "Moral Majority" in the late 1970s, was a congenial, likable man many steps removed from the "bizarre public persona" incorporated into media portraits, Falwell observes in one of her earlier chapters.

Only white people can be racist according to ‘View’ co-host Joy Behar. Also on the March 24 broadcast, both Behar and Whoopi Goldberg justified Barack Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright by pointing to Bush’s association with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and their many controversial remarks. It could be a valid point if Falwell or Robertson were Bush’s pastor for 20 years. Neither of them ever were.

After Elisabeth Hasselbeck labeled Reverend Wright "racist," Whoopi Goldberg jumped in and alluded to the late Reverend Jerry Falwell’s suggestion that God allowed the September 11 attacks because of secular forces in America. Whoopi asked Elisabeth if she should leave the Republican party because of that. Elisabeth noted that Falwell is not her spiritual adviser. Joy Behar then claimed that Robertson and Falwell are "spiritual advisers" to the Republican party.

Behar then essentially stated it is impossible for those in the "oppressed minority" (African Americans) to be racist. This is according to her college sociology professor.

Roland Martin, a talk radio host out of Chicago and contributor to CNN, appearing on the network immediately Barack Obama’s "race speech" on Tuesday morning, compared the reaction to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s much-publicized comments to the reaction to the Catholic sex scandal. Co-anchor Heidi Collins asked, "He [Obama] didn't disagree strong enough to go to a different church though. He stayed for many, many years. How do you think that will play?" Martin’s responded, "But frankly, I think that is irrelevant, because I don't -- look, I was born and raised Catholic. The first 25 years of my life of my life, I was Catholic.... And there are a number of people out there who are still Catholic today, even though the Church dropped the ball when it came to the whole issue of sex offenders, and some who left. But that's fine. But the reality is a person's faith is a personal decision."

Martin made similar comments on Monday’s "Newsroom" program during a discussion of Rev. Wright’s comments with co-anchor Don Lemon and Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus at the bottom of the 3 pm Eastern hour. "[Y]ou have a number of people who have said that, for Catholics, will you leave the Catholic Church because of what the church did when it came to sexual abuse victims? And you know what? A lot of folks have stayed."

During the roundtable segment on Monday's The Situation Room, CNN's Jack Cafferty compared the racist and anti-American words of Barack Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to Jerry Falwell's and Pat Robertson's condemnation of the many abortions in America. Cafferty, who in January suggested that abortion is a "crap" issue, asserted: "How is this different than John McCain chasing after Pat Robertson or the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, who talk about how we have a culture of murdering unborn children in this country and that we've turned into Sodom because we coddled the gay community in this country? I mean, to me, that stuff is considerably more offensive than decrying racial violence and intolerance in this country, which members of the black community have some firsthand knowledge of." (Transcript follows)

What do you know? Time magazine ran a list of the Top Ten Editorial Cartoons of 2007, and the only American political figures coming in for lampooning were . . . conservatives.

Four of the cartoons were not explicitly political [sex habits of the elderly, contaminated products from China, VA Tech shootings, Barry Bonds steroids scandal].

But of those that satirized political figures, all were Republicans or conservatives:

See update at foot -- ESPN teases football player for dressing like Tinky Winky.

Like a youngster stubbornly unwilling to admit that the Tooth Fairy isn't real, Keith Olbermann seems unable to accept that Tinky Winky is gay. Perhaps the MSNBC host should check with some of his more sophisticated friends.

On last night's show, Olbermann imagined he was having fun at this NewsBuster's expense, mocking my item from earlier this week, Gay Dumbledore: Somewhere, Jerry Falwell Is Smiling.

View video here.

"It’s a children’s show, folks. To think we would be putting sexual innuendo in a children’s show is kind of outlandish." -- spokesman for Itsy Bitsy Entertainment Co., which licenses Teletubby characters in the United States.

Yeah, outlandish. I mean, how could anyone imagine there could be undisclosed gay characters in pop-culture materials for children? That Jerry Falwell, what a Christian conservative crank! We all remember how the MSM rightly unloaded on him when he suggested that the Teletubby Tinky Winky could be a hidden homosexual, because "he is purple, the gay pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle, the gay pride symbol." Not to mention that he carried a purse. What ridiculous speculation!

Here we go again. Another instance of a reporter mocking conservative Christian teaching. And giving an atta-boy to Jimmy Carter to boot.

In an October 11 post to The Skinny blog at CBSNews.com, Keach Hagey took a reductionist and highly stereotypical slant to biblical teaching on Christian households, mocking the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for offering women "an academic degree in their special, God-given role," which Hagey described as making dinner:

CNN's upcoming miniseries "God's Warriors," hosted by left-wing bias exemplar Christiane Amanpour, looks like it will play the old liberal game of moral equivalence. Amanpour reportedly compares Christian chastity advocates to the Taliban in the miniseries. Even the promos for the miniseries which have been running on CNN for the past few weeks demonstrate the probable "game plan" that Amanpour and CNN have in mind, grouping together pro-life Christian college students protesting in front of the Supreme Court, Jewish settlers on the West Bank, and Islamic radicals. To paraphrase an old children's jingle, "two of these things are not like the other."

An "unprecedented six-hour television event," the miniseries will examine "God's Jewish Warriors" on Tuesday night, "God's Muslim Warriors" on Wednesday night, and "God's Christian Warriors" on Thursday night. A preview of "God's Christian Warriors," which ran on Friday's "The Situation Room," featured an interview of Jerry Falwell, which was conducted a week before the evangelical pastor's death. As one might expect, Amanpour asked Falwell about his much-publicized connection of the 9/11 attacks with secularism in America, in particular, the legalization of abortion.

Does the MSM have the vaguest clue about what makes Republicans tick? For months the liberal media has been propounding the absurd notion that John McCain's quest to obtain the Republican presidential nomination has been undermined by his support for the Iraq war. The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart seems a good guy, but he has now added a clueless coda to that misperception, suggesting that McCain's efforts to repair his relations with the religious right has done him in.

Capehart was part of a panel on this afternoon's "Hardball." Mike Barnicle guest hosted for Chris Matthews, and asked the question "is John McCain gone?"

Opined Capehart:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIALIST JONATHAN CAPEHART: At least for me, as a member of the press, when John McCain . . . called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," I thought now there's straight talk, that's someone standing on his own two feet. But then, when he walked away from that recently, I thought wait a minute, what happened to straight talk?

Fortunately, the Weekly Standard's Matt Continetti was there to set him straight.

CNN's Pressroom announced that its upcoming six-hour special “God's Warriors,” reported by Christiane Amanpour, will discuss “the impact of religious fundamentalism as a powerful political force.” In the process, CNN revealed what it thinks about the various “fundamentalists” around the world by pushing the typical multi-culti PC media position that no one religion is more problematic or violent than another, with all types of fundamentalism being equally dangerous.

Their examples of fundamentalists spoke volumes. Photo captions on the program's website easily labeled a Jewish group “terrorist,” but in every mention, called Palestinian suicide bombers “martyr” or “martyrs.” Into that mix of religious violence, CNN bizarrely included the non-violent American Christian youth group, Battle Cry. Sure, that makes sense. No conviction by association there.

Almost 28 years ago I toyed with my first professional writing adventure. My college roommate Joe Duggan had approached me with the proposition that we freelance a profile piece on the man who was grabbing national headlines with his political activism, so we drove down to Lynchburg Virginia, attended a service at the Thomas Road Baptist Church, and then settled in for an hour-long interview with its founder. Yesterday I returned to that church, this time with my son David, and joined by the 6,000 packed inside the building, and thousands more seated at Liberty University’s Vines Center and Williams stadium, we paid our final respects at Jerry Falwell’s funeral service.

His story is one of extraordinary professional accomplishments: The Thomas Road Baptist Church, with 24,000 members; Liberty University, with 27,000 students and 125,000 graduates; the Old Time Gospel Hour radio and television programs – on and on it goes, a ministerial enterprise that operates on a $200 million annual budget. Oh, and along the way he also founded the Moral Majority, the political juggernaut critically instrumental in the election of Ronald Reagan.

Okay, I don't really get this, but apparently Stone Phillips, the just-laid-off "Dateline NBC" anchor, tops the list at "Google Trends" today.

You don't believe me?! I thought you wouldn't. See screencaps below the fold. By comparison, the late Jerry Falwell, whose funeral was today, came in at only #10.

Keep in mind the trend doesn't mean Phillips is the hottest search on the Web, just the "fastest-rising." According to Google:

With Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what's on the public's collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of the current top 100 fastest rising search queries in the U.S.

All three news magazines devoted a page to remembering Jerry Falwell this week, but Time and Newsweek were each obnoxious in their own way. Time ended their article with a dismissive quote from leftist Jim Wallis: "the Evangelicals have left the Right. They now reside with Jesus." Newsweek displayed false generosity in saying sometimes he was a demagogue, and sometimes he was the ringmaster of a circus: "He could be a demagogue, but he was as much a P.T. Barnum as anything else."

Time magazine, in a back-page article titled "Jerry's Kids" -- which could be an insulting reference to Falwell followers, but is probably intended to bless his more palatable, "more moderate" successors -- Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs suggested that Falwell thought party labels were more important than the social issues:

Bill Maher, host of HBO's "Real Time", tore into Jerry Falwell on the May 18 edition of his show, saying, with a photo of Falwell in the background, such things as, “... death isn’t always sad." The worst comments from Maher came from his argument for turning homosexuality into a religion, with references to the Mass as gay oral sex and reception of Holy Communion as gay oral sex. Here is the clip. WARNING: the material is very offensive.

Bob Knight, Director of the Culture and Media Institute offers these thoughts on the media's treatment of the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell.

In many of his talks to Liberty University students, the Rev. Jerry Falwell emphasized the importance of “finishing well.”

On Tuesday, May 15, he was at the top of his game when he unexpectedly died in the college office where he was planning more expansions of the fast-growing university that he founded in 1971.

The Rev. Falwell did a lot of things well, ticking off liberals right up to the end. How else would he have garnered the kind of tribute from a major newspaper’s religion writer that was headlined, “Sigh of relief over Falwell death.”

To make sure no one mistook her, Chicago Sun-Times Religion Writer Cathleen Falsani’s May 18 column explains her reaction to the news about Dr. Falwell on May 15.

As Mark Finkelstein noted, (following the well-worn formula of "trash Bush, get a book deal, and be excerpted lovingly by Time magazine and interviewed on 60 Minutes") former Bush faith-initiative aide David Kuo is again milking the conservative-trashing formula after Jerry Falwell's death. On National Public Radio's evening newscast All Things Considered on Wednesday night, Kuo continued his attack line that Falwell harmed the cause of Jesus and social conservatism:

Yesterday, a friend from Los Angeles called. The person is successful, known, part of the entertainment industry. Jerry Falwell is, my friend said, the reason I can't call myself a Christian in Hollywood. He is what everyone thinks to that when they hear the word Christian. That may well be Jerry Falwell's most enduring and most troubling legacy. Jerry Falwell almost single-handedly blurred the line between Jesus and conservative politics to the detriment of both.

It might not be surprising for liberal blog commenters or talk-radio callers to denounce Rev. Jerry Falwell upon his death, but it's a little more surprising when it comes to a professed Christian who's religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Cathleen Falsani reflected on her first reaction about hearing Falwell was "relief" and compared him to gangster TV character Tony Soprano:

Knowing I didn't have a deadline to meet that day, my first thoughts were not of what to say or write.

In fact, my very first thought upon hearing of the Rev. Falwell's passing was: Good.

And I didn't mean "good" in a oh-good-he's-gone-home-to-be-with-the-Lord kind of way. I meant "good" as in "Ding-dong, the witch is dead."

Almost from the moment that Jerry Falwell's death was announced on Tuesday, the leftwing nutroots at the Democratic Underground began gleefully dancing upon his grave. Here are just a few of their hate rants about Falwell:

Uncharitable or not, I am sorry his death was not more painful and drawn out. He did not deserve a relatively peaceful, painless and quick death.

Rot in Hell Falwell!

May Pat Robertson and James Dobson be next.

CBS News producer/blogger Greg Kandra opened the e-mailbag today to relay to "Couric & Co." readers some negative reaction to the network's coverage of Rev. Jerry Falwell's death. In particular, Kandra quoted from a female Liberty University graduate and vascular surgeon who took issue with historian/guest pundit Douglas Brinkley's assessment of Falwell's views on women.

In an appearance on the May 15 "Evening News," Brinkley dismissed Falwell as a reactionary who (emphasis mine) was "opposed to some of the progressive liberal high watermarks of the 1960s, and certainly he wanted--his returning to family values was returning to women being in the kitchen, in many ways."

That unfair assessment is shared by CBS ombudsblogger Brian Montopoli, who in a May 16 "PublicEye" post agreed that Brinkley's statement was "a pretty fair characterization."

[A quick aside, Montopoli has previously described himself as a "secular humanist" in the online networking forum, Facebook.com]

The only trouble is its an unfair, inaccurate cheap shot against Falwell. Noted Dr. Amy Lipscomb in a letter to CBS News (emphasis mine):

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz interviewed America's top anchorman for Thursday's paper, and the anchor of ABC's World News was determined: "Charlie Gibson was determined not to lead his newscast with the preacher's death." He explained:

"It lends importance to a figure whose legacy contained a lot of positives and a lot of negatives," says the ABC anchor, who was once a reporter in Falwell's home base of Lynchburg, Va. "It venerates the subject to an extent that I didn't think belonged there. He was a controversial figure."

In 2003, David Kuo resigned from the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and later wrote a book [published just before the 2006 mid-term elections] claiming that the administration was hypocritical in its dealings with religious conservatives.

The MSM had a field day because according to them [as E.J. Dionne wrote here, for example], Kuo was a religious conservative himself. But is that true? What kind of religious conservative, the day after Jerry Falwell died, would go on MSNBC's Tucker Carlson show and say this about the late pastor?:

DAVID KUO: In bringing the pulpit to politics in the very strident, narrow and frankly angry way that he did, he very much damaged the name of Jesus.

View video here

Less than 10 minutes after it featured Christopher Hitchens hate-filled remarks against Jerry Falwell, Tuesday night's “Anderson Cooper 360" featured another critic of the late evangelist, Mel White. White, an openly gay minister, runs a radical homosexual activist organization called Soulforce. White wrote two books for Falwell before coming-out as a homosexual. While he expressed his sadness upon hearing of his former colleague’s death, White expressed his belief that Falwell caused the deaths of homosexuals by his rhetoric.

After asking White what he was feeling after learning of Falwell’s death, and about his own strained relationship with the late evangelist, host Anderson Cooper asked, “Personally, do you think he [Falwell] hated gays?” White responded,

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has issued a call to media outlets to stick to a script of liberal bias and emphasize "Falwell's history of denigrative comments and examine the cultural progress toward inclusion, acceptance and respect that he fought against." Their website even included a story from CNN’s Newsroom from Tuesday afternoon, in which CNN prominently included old protest video that placed a large illustration of Falwell’s face next to a large illustration of Hitler’s face. So much for GLAAD's "anti-defamation" pose. Video: Real (582 KB) or Windows (659 KB) plus MP3 (97 KB)

On "Anderson Cooper 360," CNN correspondent Randi Kaye, who raised eyebrows in December for a story worrying about Saddam suffering when he hanged, shared no comparable horror at the death of Falwell. Her transcript read like a commercial for GLAAD, as their president Neil Giuliano was the only talking head in the piece (except for taped tidbits of Falwell) as he insisted Falwell was un-Christian: "Falwell’s attacks were a violation of religious faith."

Update/Related (16:44 | May 17) P.J. Gladnick of "DUmmie FUnnies" (also an NB blogger) has a blog entry about Democratic Underground worrying about commenter bile over Falwell damaging their "cause."

Update (10:14 EDT | May 17): WikipediaReview.com picked up on this post. The discussion board's slogan: "Now with 100 percent better judgment, care, and sensitivity than Wikipedia itself." Check them out.

(Content warning: Inappropriate, crass comments from left-wing nutjobs excerpted below)

Joking that an elderly religious man died from suffocating on a penis is not my idea of anything "comical." It is to the George Carlin wannabes at Wonkette though, reporting on a vandalized Jerry Falwell page on Wikipedia:

Something happened to somebody famous, so guess what happened on Wikipedia … that’s right, the person’s page was comically vandalized! Nobody ever gets tired of a really good joke.

Accompanying that post was a screenshot of a Wikipedia page (it has since been cleaned up) which read: "Jerry Falwell choked on Pat Robertson's cock to death. THE END wootah."

You'll recall that in March, MRC's Brent Bozell wrote about Wikipedia's bias against conservatives, but this is ridiculous.

On Wonkette's part, posting such an item served only to provide another comment thread for wingunuts to spew hatred about Falwell and religious conservatives, such as this dirge by commenter "choirboy":

Over the past years, the liberal mainstream media has produced gushing tributes to deceased "secular saints" such as Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Coretta Scott King. It would have been practically sacrilegious for these outlets to air any kind of immediate criticism of such figures. Yet, in the 24 hours or so since the death of Christian conservative leader Jerry Falwell, the mainstream media has given air time to every sort of criticism of the late evangelical. On Tuesday night's "Anderson Cooper 360," noted atheist Christopher Hitchens launched one of the most vitriolic attacks to date on Falwell. Among the terms Hitchens used to describe Falwell were "ugly little charlatan," "bully," "fraud," and "little toad."

A NewsBusters reader sent us an MP3 clip of an ABC News radio report from the afternoon of May 15 by "Nightline" host Terry Moran. In it, Moran boils down the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's clerical career and political activism to one extreme soundbite from shortly after 9/11.

Moran left unmentioned that Falwell later clarified his statements to reflect more accurately his belief that God lifted the "curtain" of His protection to allow 9/11 to happen, and closed his report emphasizing Falwell as a marginalized political actor:

MORAN: In 2001, just two days after the 9/11 attacks, Falwell infamously and appallingly blamed the mass murder not on terrorists...

FALWELL sound bite: The pagans and the abortionists...