Liberal Esquire political columnist Charles Pierce, formerly with the Boston Globe, joined MSNBC’s All In on Thursday during live coverage of Pope Francis’s visit to New York City and used the occasion of the Pope’s speech hours earlier before Congress to lash out at Ted Cruz and conservatives for not endorsing climate change or other liberal social issues as does the Pontiff.
Pope John Paul II
By Curtis Houck | September 23, 2015 | 8:15 PM EDT
Joining Brian Williams for his second day back anchoring MSNBC’s coverage of Pope Francis’s visit to the United States on Wednesday afternoon, Catholic and Hardball host Chris Matthews blasted Francis’s predecessor Pope Benedict XVI for being “so fragile and removed” and possessing a “weakness” and “coldness” that Francis does not have. The disgraced former NBC Nightly News anchor gushed over Matthews’s “patriotism” for the U.S. that’s “matched only by his exuberance.”
By Tom Blumer | June 30, 2015 | 2:46 PM EDT
In a column at ForeignPolicy.com, a former Obama administration defense official who "served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011" has asked: "Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State?"
Rosa Brooks, who "is a law professor at Georgetown University," is serious. Her earnestness and deep ignorance are especially troubling, because it's clear that there are many people who "think" just like her who are still in the Obama administration and at the State Department (See: John Kerry's slow-motion sellout in Iranian negotiations).
By Ken Shepherd | February 12, 2015 | 6:51 PM EST
Did Brian Williams repeatedly lie about a meeting with the pope?
By Randy Hall | December 10, 2014 | 6:27 PM EST
Every December, the people at TIME magazine choose the “Person of the Year,” who is described as “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”
Two of the candidates for the 2014 honor were: the Ferguson, Missouri, protesters, “who took to the streets ... following the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer;” and the Ebola caregivers, who are still fighting the biggest outbreak of the disease in history, which has so far claimed the lives of nearly 7,000 people in West Africa.
By Matthew Balan | October 6, 2014 | 1:19 PM EDT
NPR's Sylvia Poggioli promoted the cause of dissenters inside the Catholic Church on Sunday's Weekend Edition, as she covered the beginning of special meeting of bishops at the Vatican. She featured seven soundbites from four such dissenters (and didn't identify three of them as such), and none from orthodox Catholics.
The correspondent also played up the "vehement response" from five cardinals to "the Pope's favorite theologian" over his proposal to loosen the Church's discipline regarding divorced Catholics.
By Tom Blumer | July 8, 2014 | 8:32 PM EDT
On Monday evening's NBC Nightly News, host Brian Williams used a perhaps revealing verb to describe a belief held by former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who died on Monday at 86.
It would be good to look back and learn how Shevardnadze came to say what he said a decade ago before getting to how Williams framed it. As reported in Doug Martin's obituary at the New York Times (bolds are mine throughout this post):
By Matthew Balan | May 21, 2014 | 6:14 PM EDT
Carol Costello and her two clerical guests slammed "climate change deniers" on Wednesday's CNN Newsroom. Costello pointed out a recent sarcastic Tweet by Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak on the climate change issue that "sparked a firestorm," and spotlighted how "religious leaders are more than concerned about statements like that. They're now battling climate change deniers on moral grounds."
The anchor turned to Reverend Mitchell Hescox of the Evangelical Environmental Network and CNN religion commentator Father Edward Beck as her one-sided panel on the topic, and accused the "deniers" of not only eschewing science, but also being unfaithful to Scripture: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
By Matthew Balan | April 28, 2014 | 7:57 PM EDT
ABC, CBS, and NBC spotlighted the issue of child sex abuse by priests on their Saturday morning and evening newscasts – twenty-four hours or less before the Catholic Church canonized Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. CBS and NBC both uncritically turned to the president of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), but didn't mention her controversial affiliations with prominent anti-Catholics.
CBS and ABC also hyped how "some of the faithful have complained the canonization process was fast-tracked." ABC's Terry Moran even inserted some slanted labeling of the Catholic practice of venerating the relics of saints on Saturday's World News, and wondered if modern people could relate to the Church's examples of holiness: [MP3 audio from the networks' reporting available here; video below the jump]
By Ken Shepherd | April 17, 2014 | 3:06 PM EDT
Promising a look at the "seedy side of sainthood," Daily Beast Vatican correspondent Barbie Latza Nadeau hyped the concerns of "critics [who] say the two popes were pushed through to sainthood without a thorough vetting."
Latza Nadeau's story comes 10 days before the canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II and, perhaps more importantly, on Holy Thursday, arguably a stick in the eye for devout Catholics during Holy Week.
By Matthew Balan | March 29, 2014 | 2:22 PM EDT
Friday's CBS Evening News featured a previously unaired portion of Scott Pelley's softball interview of President Obama on his recent meeting with Pope Francis. The Vatican noted on Thursday that "there was a discussion on questions of particular relevance for the Church...such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection" – a reference to the Catholic Church's objection to ObamaCare's abortifacient/contraception mandate.
But instead of asking about this discussion, Pelley gave the President the kid glove treatment, and wondered how the encounter affected the liberal politician: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
By Matthew Balan | March 13, 2014 | 6:48 PM EDT
MSNBC's Ronan Farrow marked the one-year anniversary of the election of Pope Francis on Thursday by browbeating the Catholic Church for supposedly thwarting the fight against AIDS in the developing world, and for the Church's apparent lack of action in stopping genocide. Farrow played up how "Church social policies often fly in the face of skyrocketing HIV rates," and bemoaned how "the Church does still ban contraception in those places. Is that costing lives?"
The neophyte TV host asked one of his priest guests, "You don't think that it's irresponsible, given the emphasis on mercy and the preservation of life, that there's not more leeway on that doctrine?" He also played up how "brutal conflicts in countries with significant Catholic populations demand attention that some say the Church is failing to provide," and faulted the Church for its apparent inaction during the genocide in Rwanda almost 20 years ago: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]