Religion

Monday night marks the debut of Lawrence O'Donnell's very own show, called The Last Word, on MSNBC and if his guest spots on various programs on that network and the syndicated McLaughlin Group over the last few years are any indication, he's bound to give Keith Olbermann a run for his money for over-the-top loony tirades.O'Donnell reared his bigoted side on the December 8, 2007 edition of the…

The sexual revolution always seems to have another frontier. Indeed, the very idea of a “revolution” would be negated were there no frontiers to conquer. So deeper, ever deeper, we plumb the depths. Look at television. Every new frontier is just another titillating, initially shocking plot for a fictional or “reality” show, until there's a “new normal” and the novelty and naughtiness wears off.…

Appearing as a guest on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane made a crack about his willingness to have sex with Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell after host Maher showed a clip of O’Donnell from a Politically Incorrect episode from 1998. After a clip of the GOP candidate in which denied believing in the theory of evolution, MacFarlane…

On Friday's Situation Room, CNN highlighted the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's concerns over a planned concert at Fort Bragg, North Carolina organized by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Foundation, but omitted the MRFF president Michael Weinstein's past invective against Christianity. Anchor Wolf Blitzer referred to the MRFF as merely a "watchdog group."Blitzer introduced correspondent…

ABC on Friday did its best to find secret discrimination against Muslims, sending Good Morning America's Bianna Golodryga undercover in a hijab (Islamic head covering). Yet, despite the misleading graphic, "Life Under the Veil: TV Experiment Exposes Bias," the morning show didn't find much bigotry. Late in the segment, Golodryga admitted, "Overt discrimination is the exception." When an ABC…

CNN played an excerpt of its upcoming documentary "What the Pope Knew" on Thursday's Newsroom (see CNN's commercial promoting the documentary at right), and if this preview and its past coverage of the Church abuse scandal is any indication, the documentary left out key information in order to paint Benedict XVI in the worst possible light. Correspondent Gary Tuchman failed to explain how then-…

UPDATE (9/30 - 1:13 pm): The Society of Professional Journalists emailed me requesting a correction. Clarification - though no correction - below the fold. When American religious leaders spoke out against the planned burning of Korans by a crazy Florida pastor, it was a hot news item. Likewise, when another group of clergy condemned the supposed "anti-Muslim frenzy" in the United States, the…

Mollie Hemingway at the religion-news analysis blog Get Religion caught how the taxpayer-funded liberals at National Public Radio cover momentous events for the Roman Catholic Church: by speculating that a historic Cardinal might have been a homosexual, even though they admit there's no proof: On the final day of his United Kingdom trip, Pope Benedict XVI formally beatified English theologian and…

The Huffington Post would like to present itself as an oasis of religious tolerance. When they started their Religion section, Arianna Huffington decried that "all too often, when talking about it, we end up talking at each other instead of with each other." Weeks ago, they published Nida Khan lamenting conservative Islamophobia, as "a vocal minority of extremists to capitalize and advance on…

Comedian Joy Behar repeated her 'View' tirade against Christine O'Donnell on her eponymous HLN network program yesterday, denouncing the Delaware Republican Senate nominee as "crazy" and suggesting she should see a psychotherapist."You know, I'm not a shrink, but this is the crazy train this girl is on," chortled Behar, who also belittled O'Donnell on ABC's "The View" yesterday. After maligning O…

Here's a fact you're not likely to see on tonight's evening news broadcasts: According to a recent poll, Arabs living abroad are more likely to be opposed to the "Ground Zero Mosque" than the American media are.According to a recent survey by the Arabic online news service Elaph (Arabic version here), 58 percent of Arabs think the construction should be moved elsewhere. And according to a Media…

Disgraced former White House correspondent Helen Thomas will be receiving a lifetime achievement award next month from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.Coming roughly three months after Thomas was forced to resign from Hearst Newspapers for disgustingly telling Israeli Jews to move back to Germany and Poland and "get the hell out of Palestine," this is clearly going to raise a lot of…

Imagine six Israelis had been arrested in the US and charged with possibly plotting against a visiting ayatollah.  Rhetorical question: would Today have mentioned their nationality and/or religion?But when reportedly six Algerian Muslims were arrested in the UK and charged with possibly plotting against visiting Pope Benedict XVI, Today breathed not a word of their identity.  Reporter Nina Dos…

On Friday's American Morning, CNN's Carol Costello followed up on her biased report from the previous day, which promoted Catholic women posing as priests, with a second report on dissenting Catholics, focusing on heterodox nuns inside the U.S. Costello promoted the claim of the nuns, who accuse the Vatican of conducting an "inquisition," or wanting to "silence nuns when they disagree with the…