Anti-Religious Bias

Outspoken Christian athlete Tim Tebow, now the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, has been widely criticized by many in the media. NFL analysts are starting to admit that criticism, in large part, has been because of his faith. ''Inside the NFL'' analyst and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on his…

Actress Susan Sarandon is notorious for espousing liberal causes and bashing conservatives. Now, she is attacking the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI. In a public interview with Bob Balaban at the Hamptons Film Festival, Sarandon told an audience that she had sent a copy of a book to Pope John Paul II. She then said: “The last Pope, not this Nazi one we have now.” When chided…

It was said of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, that if he won the 1928 presidential election he would take orders from the Vatican and not uphold the Constitution. John F. Kennedy famously confronted that anti-Catholic prejudice in a 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy said in part, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute;…

Only at the self-described "Essential Global News Network" could the Sunday deaths in Egypt of 26 people, mostly Coptic Christians, be kept out of a story's headline and their mention deferred until the third paragraph. But that's what readers will see in the four-paragraph grab which follows from a much longer item by the Associated Press's Maggie Michael yesterday:

Preaching that homosexuality is a sin is "bullying" and akin to "child molestation" and must be stopped, argued Mitchell Gold of Faith in America on today's "MSNBC Live" hosted by Thomas Roberts. For his part, openly gay host Roberts failed to question Gold's assertion or to hold out that Gold's view may at best border on anti-religious bigotry (emphasis mine; video courtesy of MRCTV's Bob…

NBC’s series The Playboy Club remains in search of an audience, so some stars are lashing out on Twitter at the Parents Television Council, who’s calling for the show to be cancelled, since it promotes one of the world’s leading pornography brands. David Krumholtz – who many might remember from CBS’s “Numb3rs”– attacked the PTC on Twitter for “randomly” choosing the Playboy show, but…

If we post this story on Facebook, will the company remove it? According to a new study from the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and the American Center for Law and Justice, there's a good chance it will. NRB conducted a study of "the practices of Apple and its iTunes App Store, Google, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers AT&T, Comcast and Verizon…

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli filed a completely one-sided report on Wednesday's All Things Considered about a radical-left organization, along with a group purporting to represent victims of clergy sexual abuse, lobbying the International Criminal Court to investigate the top leadership of the Catholic Church, including Pope Benedict XVI, for "crimes against humanity." Poggioli played sound bites only…

It sure didn't take HBO's Bill Maher long to make his first hateful remark about the religious right. Roughly one minute into his opening monologue on Friday's "Real Time" the host said, "In today's Republican Party there's a term for people who hate charity and love killing - Christian" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is no libertarian, he's a theocrat, at least according to Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. His evidence? In his 2008 book "On My Honor," Perry is unapologetic in his firm grasp of orthodox Christianity. "Perry's politics are religious in a way not seen before in modern-day mainstream presidential candidates," an alarmed Milbank insisted:

As the 2012 presidential race gears up, leftist Christophobes are showing some signs of hysteria — or political opportunism; it's sometimes difficult to tell. The New York Times' executive editor, Bill Keller, in a piece in The New York Times Magazine, argues that presidential candidates should be asked tough questions about their faith. Keller wants to know whether a candidate will place "…

As NewsBusters reported last week, New York Times outgoing executive editor Bill Keller believes presidential candidates should be questioned about their religious beliefs. On Monday's "The O'Reilly Factor," media critic Bernie Goldberg marvelously said, "I wish that he and the New York Times was as concerned about religion and politics during the last campaign when it pertained to Barack…

The New York Times’s outgoing Executive Editor Bill Keller received some pushback on his recently posted column that demanded, in rather insulting fashion, that the media more aggressively question the religious views of the G.O.P. candidates. Times Watch and others noted that his paper was hardly a model of journalistic assertiveness during the spring of 2008, when Barack Obama endured…

I didn't go to the Catholic News Agency's web site tonight looking for a media bias column; I usually go there to find "positivity" posts for my home blog. When I clicked on an item with an intriguing title ("The Pope's Young Army"), I expected that the author, Father Robert Barron, would regale me with inspiring vignettes from the Pope's recently completed World Youth Day in Madrid. Well, at…