Anti-Religious Bias

After Bill Maher called the Koran "a hate-filled book" on HBO's "Real Time" Friday, NewsBusters asked if he would be attacked by the media for doing so. With no outrage having ensued, the folks at Fox News on Monday questioned why Maher's comments went ignored by the Muslim defenders in the press, with Juan Williams telling Bill O'Reilly that if he had said anything like that, "They would…

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, George Will this weekend lambasted Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee about separate comments the two have made regarding Barack Obama's background and upbringing. On Monday, during his fifth day in a row on this subject, MSNBC's Chris Matthews actually compared Will's column to William F. Buckley Jr. banning anti-Semitic writers from the National Review in the…

Defending their "Shared commitment to women and children," on the Washington Post/Newsweek's "On Faith" site, the Revs. Richard Cizik and Debra Haffner joined forces today support federal tax monies flowing to Planned Parenthood. Cizik, you may recall, is a bit of a media favorite because he hails from a generally theologically conservative tradition but has been moving leftward politically…

Today's Supreme Court ruling in Snyder v. Phelps is proving to be yet another occasion for the media to falsely describe the homosexuality-fixated Westboro Baptist Church as a "fundamentalist" congregation. The Associated Press, MSNBC and NPR.org have been among the news outlets using that tag for the Topeka, Kansas, organization that protests funerals of soliders, celebrating their deaths by…

ABC, NBC and CBS news programs have mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood 135 times in 17 years, but only linked them to fundamentalist Islam 37 percent of the time. Just since the unrest in Egypt began in January, they've mentioned the Brotherhood 85 times, and decreased how often they report the nature of the group - just 32 percent of those stories mentioned the group's extremism. Declaring "…

The National Organization for Women issued a statement from president Terry O'Neill Wednesday with a clearly anti-religion message. The headline: "U.S. Catholic Bishops Major Force Behind War on Women." It began: The collusion of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has led to an open declaration of war on the women of this country. The bishops have…

Those learned theologians on "The View" are at it again. Discussing how Catholic canon law advisor Dr. Edward Peters has declared that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) committed an "objectively sacrilegious" act that "produces grave scandal" by receiving Communion on January 2, almost every panelist on ABC gabfest "The View" today rebuked the scholar for his pronouncement. "Peters…

Don't 52-year-old sports writers have anything better to do than devote a whole column to deriding a teenage athlete's faith? If you're Rick Reilly, apparently the answer is no. Reilly wrote a February 19 piece at ESPN.com trashing the religious convictions of 16-year-old Iowa wrestler Joel Northrup, who forfeited a state tournament match rather than wrestle 14-year-old Cassy Herkelman,…

If you had to narrow it down to one person, the mainstream media's favorite evangelical Christian would probably be the politically liberal Richard Cizik. The former National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) vice president resigned from the NAE in December 2008 after having made public statements to the effect that gay marriage and abortion were politically negotiable issues for Christians…

The Washington Post Style section mounted its latest favorite hobby horse again this morning with yet another article devoted to the controversial "Hide/Seek" Smithsonian exhibit, which is closing this Sunday. NewsBusters sister organization CNSNews.com broke the story in late November that sparked the controversy. You can read that story here. Shortly after Penny Starr's story, the Gallery…

It's apparently all the rage this week among mainstream media religion features to hype the unorthodox views of Boston University's Jennifer Wright Knust. On Monday, Newsweek's Lisa Miller uncritically presented her readers with a summary of arguments from the professor's new book. The next day "On Faith," -- a joint Newsweek/Washington Post online religion news/comment feature -- published…

On Monday I noted how Newsweek religion writer Lisa Miller uncritically peddled the work of two religion scholars who argue that the Bible is not as restrictive on sexual mores as it's widely understood to be. Yesterday, On Faith, a joint project of the Washington Post and Newsweek, granted one of those scholars, Boston University's Jennifer Wright Knust, what appears to be the first of a…

Leave it to the religion writer who sees the Jesus of the Bible as "typically cranky" to give credence to "scholars" who argue the Bible considers gay and/or premarital sex perfectly kosher. In her February 6 post, "What the Bible Really Says About Sex," Miller noted that "[t]wo new books written by university scholars for a popular audience try to answer this question.":

On Thursday evening I noted news reports that the Fox entertainment network would not air an ad by a Christian website, LookUp316 -- referring of course to John 3:16 -- during Super Bowl XLV. So I was pleasantly surprised last night to find that Fox did air the ad after all, just before the beginning of the 4th quarter of the game. USA Today religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman was also…