Religion

The scene: a network newsroom in Manhattan, editorial meeting for the June 24 evening broadcast. “Hey, what about this story of Meriam Ibrahim? Looks like Sudan released her and then rearrested her.” “Meh, another African Christian condemned by Muslim fanatics to death for her faith, yada, yada, yada. We need something really important, that cuts right to the fundamental conflicts and…

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart took a break from spouting his left-wing version of the news to interview Bill Maher, HBO’s favorite atheist talk show host. When the host of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart asked Maher if he ever felt he had affected real change in the political world, he replied that the “needle has moved” away from religion and towards legalization of drugs, two of Maher’s pet…

Once again, ABC News is promoting an outspoken activist within the Mormon Church, Kate Kelly who was excommunicated from the church for actively lobbying for the inclusion of female priests within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  On Monday June 23, ABC’s Mara Schiavocampo played up how "After being tried in absentia by an all-male panel, this afternoon, Kate Kelly got the…

Following the insulting trend of tagging every objection or concern raised about Obama administration policy and conduct as exclusively the province of Republicans and conservatives to an outrageous extreme, Rebecca Kaplan at CBS News opened her Monday story about whether the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) might plan terrorist acts in the U.S. as follows: "Republicans are sounding the…

The people at NBC who are agonizing over David Gregory's ongoing audience freefall at his Meet the Press perch need only look at the first half of his interview with 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to see why it's happening. Gregory basically refused to acknowledge the existence of Romney's core argument, which is essentially that he wouldn't have done what President Obama…

Well, ABC and NBC are acting to type, ever reluctant to call evil by its name when doing so is politically incorrect (and possibly dangerous). Consider both networks’ reporting on the story of the school girls kidnapped last month in Nigeria, and a second, smaller group kidnapped last week. To date, NBC identified the kidnappers of hundreds of Christian girls as Islamist less than 33 percent…

Paul Whitefield "is a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times who is copy chief of the editorial pages and a writer/scold for the Opinion L.A. blog." He also has a serious but far from unique case of Bush (and Cheney) Derangement Syndrome and an extraordinary ignorance of the history of last decade's war in Iraq, which included a victory in 2008 the U.S. press, with rare exceptions, refused to…

Jimmy Carter is not a saint. If you doubt that, read Steven Hayward’s The Real Jimmy Carter. But The New York Times never noticed that book. Last Sunday, they boosted Randall Balmer’s Carter book Redeemer, which pitches Carter metaphorically as...Christ-like. It’s bad enough that Balmer uses his book to claim nastily that the Religious Right was organized by the late Paul Weyrich around…

As commencement season winds down, Samantha Reinis at Campus Reform reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expunged God from its invocation on June 6 -- in the name of "inclusion." This decision came after an op-ed in the campus newspaper The Tech by graduate student Aaron Scheinburg, who argued the prayer should avoid religion. (?)

Officials inside the Mormon Church have chosen to expel two activists from its ranks “One who is pushing for women priests. The other targeted for questioning church doctrine” and ABC’s Good Morning America did it's best to hype the supposed “controversy inside the Mormon Church.” On Friday, June 13, ABC’s Mara Schiavocampo promoted how “It's a shocking move by the Church of Jesus Christ of…

Both of Comedy Central’s favorite comedians took the time on their shows on June 11 to make fun of upstart conservative congressional nominee David Brat for his Christian faith while subtly hinting at a strain of anti-Semitism in either the Virginia Republican himself or the GOP voters of the 7th District which chose him over Majority Leader Eric Cantor. In fact, both Jon Stewart and Stephen…

Early reporting on Tuesday’s Republican primary upset in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District indicated that Dave Brat’s stand on immigration reform was the main reason Brat defeated Eric Cantor, but Esquire political blogger Charles Pierce isn’t buying it. In a Wednesday post, Pierce argued that the immigration issue was less important than Brat’s opposition to the idea that “the…

For a guy who claims "I don't want to demonize my opponents," Michael Eric Dyson does a dynamite job of it!   And thus, guest-hosting on MSNBC today for Ed Schultz, Dyson ripped Republicans who express "all this Christian rhetoric that we're sanctified and saved and believe in the righteousness of God," yet have the audacity to disagree with him on granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. View…

According to an article last Sunday in the online magazine Salon, there's a new intellectual dynamic duo in town: French economist Thomas Piketty and American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who've become media superstars almost simultaneously over the past few months thanks to Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and Tyson's TV series "Cosmos." Writer Paul Rosenberg…