Anti-Religious Bias

Suggest that infrequent churchgoer Barack Obama may not really be a sincere from-the-heart Christian and MSNBC's anchors will be chief among the media pack to denounce you for questioning the president's religious faith. But when it comes to Herman Cain, MSNBC's Martin Bashir is comfortable not merely charging the presidential contender as a hypocrite but suggesting he's headed to Hell (MP3…

In an item at the Associated Press datelined early Monday morning not labeled as "analysis" or otherwise characterized as the reporter's point of view, the wire service's Amy Teibel went on the attack against current developments in Israeli politics and society in extraordinarily harsh terms, to the point where her report could easily have been mistaken for a leftist's political stump speech…

On the first Sunday of Advent, The Washington Post devoted two stories on the front of its Arts section to revisiting last year's controversy over a gay-left exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that starred a video with ants crawling on the crucifix of Jesus. The "Hide/Seek" propaganda assembly is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum, and Post critic Philip Kennicott thinks the "right-…

On November 15 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I compared how two of the leading wire services, Reuters and the Associated Press, covered the announcement by Geron Corp. of its decision to halt the first government-approved clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells. Reuters fairly noted that "teams working with adult stem cells -- a less ambitious area -- are making good progress." While…

Imagine if a newspaper disproportionately and endlessly harped upon decades-old crimes committed by black people. Even if the stories were all true, people would be rightfully outraged at the paper’s overt racism in consistently and repeatedly targeting the past misdeeds of people of one particular race. The public would never allow such blatant bigotry. Such a comparison can be applied to…

Time's Tim Padgett regurgitated just about every liberal talking point on abortion in an online column on Thursday which tried to claim that the Catholic Church's pro-life efforts in the U.S. were pointless and out of step with the laity: "Aren't they just wasting our time as well as their own?" Padgett cherry-picked from Church documents and quoted from the infamous pro-abortion front group…

The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn told officials at the Brooklyn Museum that a video depicting Jesus Christ on a cross with ants crawling over him is “disrespectful” to Christians and requested that it be removed, but Bishop Nicholas DeMarzio is not making public the correspondence between him and the museum. The video, “A Fire in My Belly” by the late gay activist David…

The TLC show "19 Kids and Counting" chronicles the daily activities of a loving, responsible Arkansas family of two parents and 19 children navigating their way through life with large clan. But last week, when Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar announced they are expecting their 20th child in April, the media reaction was far from joyous. They called it a "Horror." They suggested Michelle has a "…

To Washington Post religion reporter Lisa Miller, evangelical ministers like Rick Warren and Tim Keller should be applauded for their "clinical frankness" about God's design for sexual pleasure within the covenant of marriage in their sermons, books, and even tweets. Now if only they could just get over that silly biblical injunction against homosexuality, Miller lamented in her November 10 "…

Initiative 26 -- which would have amended the Mississippi state constitution to include unborn children as persons protected under the law -- was rejected by Magnolia State voters last night. In response, Georgetown professor and Washington Post "On Faith" blog contributor Jacques Berlinerblau quickly hacked out a post celebrating the temporary victory over the "devastating sleeper cell of a…

The day before Mississippi voters went to the polls to decide whether to amend the state constitution to define "person" to include unborn children as early as the point of conception, Washington Post's Sally Quinn set out to denounce Initiative 26 on the "On Faith" blog that she edits. Quinn, an atheist, groused that religious voters in the Magnolia State may make a significant change to the…

The arrest of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on pedophilia charges has absolutely nothing to do with the Catholic Church.  Neither does an alleged coverup by Penn State officials of repeated allegations of sexual misconduct against Sandusky. Yet religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman found a way to shoehorn the Church into the story in a November 6 "Faith & Reason"…

“[S]ocial conservatives believe that efforts to protect gays from assault, discrimination or bullying impinge on their religious freedom to express and act on their belief that homosexuality is an abomination. That’s stating it harshly, but it is the underlying belief,” Time religion reporter Amy Sullivan huffed in a November 4 Swampland blog post on the magazine’s website. “[T]he Michigan…

Yesterday I noted the unbalanced reporting of Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock regarding a Georgia Christian university's new policy requiring all faculty to agree to abide by certain standards of conduct, including not engaging in homosexual acts, premarital sex, or adultery. Today I found an equally biased and harshly-toned blog post from Nsenga Burton, editor-at-large of the…