Sunday night's airing of Killing Jesus -- the three-hour event based on the book of the same name by Fox News Channel anchor Bill O'Reilly and co-writer Martin Dugard -- was watched by more than 3.7 million people, a new record for the National Geographic Channel.
Of course, this isn't the first cable television adaptation of one of O'Reilly's books. Two others -- Killing Kennedy and Killing Lincoln – were also produced for the cable channel and drew high ratings as well.
In a Thursday front page New York Times story it was reported that Friends of Abe, a group made up of Hollywood conservatives like actors Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, became the latest right-leaning group to be targeted by the IRS. Total Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network time spent on this story: zero seconds.
However there was a celebrity news story the Big Three news networks did jump all over -- Justin Bieber getting arrested for drunk driving. From Thursday morning through Friday morning the Big Three networks, on their evening and morning shows, devoted a total of 36 minutes and 10 seconds to the troubled pop star.
Award-winning actor Kelsey Grammer made quite a statement on NBC's Tonight Show Tuesday.
When host Jay Leno asked how he won a Golden Globe for his performance in the new hit series Boss but didn't even get nominated for an Emmy, Grammer said, "I am a declared out-of-the-closet Republican in Hollywood" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
UPDATE: An earlier version of this post implied that Friends of Abe had raised money for California GOP candidates, which is not the case. We apologize for the mistake.
In the giant morass of Hollywood leftism, there is a small - but growing - group of conservatives doing its best to sway the utter one-sidedness of celebrity politics.
The group, known as the Friends of Abe, includes a number of well-known A-list personalities, some of them renowned for their outside-the-mainstream (in their line of work) politics. Kelsey Grammar, Gary Sinese, Dennis Miller, and Jon Voight among them.
But though the group is small, secretive, and far less influential than its political-professional counterpart (the rest of Hollywood), "conservative frustration with the Democratic control of Washington might be helping them flourish," according to the Hollywood Reporter.