In a press statement released today, MRC President Brent Bozell urged the Discovery Channel to table the misleading James Cameron documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus."
“If the Discovery Channel fails to cancel this slanderous ‘documentary,’ it will have to explain why it is intentionally misleading the public,” said L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Media Research Center, referring to Sunday’s upcoming airing of The Tomb of Jesus. “They should be embarrassed by this plunge into sensational speculation masquerading as ‘science.’ To slander Christianity at the start of the Lenten season is unconscionable.”
As NewsBusters.org reported yesterday, the February 26 edition of NBC's "Today" show plugged the upcoming documentary with a softball interview with producer James Cameron and journalist Simcha Jacobovici. [continued...]
Unlike the mainstream media hype surrounding the silver screen release of the fictional DaVinci Code, the media hype over "The Lost Tomb" pivots on Cameron's insistence that his findings are legitimate, even though numerous scholars have poured cold water on his conclusions.
Said the MRC's Culture and Media Institute director Robert Knight:
“The Discovery Channel bills itself as the ‘number one non-fiction media company reaching more than 1.5 billion people in over 170 countries.’ But this bigoted documentary is pure fiction. Numerous leading scholars, including the Israeli archaeologist who first studied the site, have already rejected the notion that Jesus of Nazareth’s bones were found in the Talpiot tomb.”
UPDATE (Ken Shepherd | 16:49 EST): Fellow NewsBuster Tim Graham passed along an excellent blog post by Ben Witherington on the inaccuracies underpinning the arguments laid out in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus."
