Anti-Religious Bias

Last year, Entertainment Weekly magazine honored the arrival of a viciously anti-Catholic tilt on the FX show “American Horror Story: Asylum,” promoting how actress “Jessica Lange returns, this time as a terrifying nun." Bigotry sells – big – in Tinseltown. This year, after that “Asylum” season aired, Hollywood has honored the show again by showering it with 17 Emmy nominations. There’s a…

Bill Maher has said some disgusting things about religion before. Possibly the most disgusting came on HBO’s Real Time Friday when the host actually said, “God in the Old Testament is a psychotic mass murderer” (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

It seems as though some media personalities never miss an opportunity to slam the Catholic Church. Take for example the July 18 Imus In The Morning on Fox Business, in which host Don Imus took an unnecessary swipe at Pope Francis and the sex abuse scandal surrounding the Catholic Church. Speaking with Father Jonathan Morris, a regular Fox News contributor, Imus suggested that, “because of all…

Readers are advised to prepare themselves for a rare dose of sanity and reality on television. On CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday, journalism professor Steve Roberts actually said, "What's missing often in TV newsrooms: there are plenty of gays, there are very few people of faith and very  few evangelical Christians who in their own beliefs would be against gay marriage. And this has always…

Offending gays or speaking ill of Muslims is a cultural taboo, but mocking the Blessed Virgin Mary is just good clean fun. That was the approach the Santa Fe Reporter took when it published its 2013 Summer Guide. The New Mexico weekly’s cover featured a full-page cartoon of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a strapless yellow bikini and sunglasses, sipping a margarita, accompanied by a beer-drinking…

Brightening up my Monday morning (not) is an item carried at CNN.com last Friday whose headline basically tells loyal, faithful spouses that they're nature-defying freaks who in the vast majority of cases are ignorantly honoring an institution which doesn't make any sense. Meghan Laslocky doesn't have the gumption to use those words. But what else are we supposed to conclude from a column…

Those paranoid Christians. Always thinking someone is persecuting them. Pro-gay violence? Christians bullied for supporting traditional marriage? Puh-leeze. Just grow up already. That stuff never happens. Only gays get bullied. That was the sarcastic approach of comedian Samantha Bee in a fake reporting segment she filmed for “The Daily Show.” Interviewing (controversial) right-wing…

In Tuesday's Washington Post, Tom Hundley of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting gave Post readers a textbook example in biased reporting freighted with loaded language. The target was a predictable bogeyman of secular liberal reporters: the Catholic Church. Hundley painted the constitutional court battle over a "reproductive health law" in the Philippines as a struggle "pit[ting] the…

And Rabbi Joshua Hammerman thought he had a “Tebow Problem” before. Back in 2011, the columnist at The Jewish Week fretted that the Tim Tebow-led Denver Broncos might beat his “beloved” New England Patriots in the upcoming AFC championship game. But his wasn’t a fan’s normal pre-game nervousness. It was the hand-wringing of a liberal bigot. Hammerman imagined that the rubes in fly-over…

Dan Savage really is a disgusting human being. On Comedy Central’s Colbert Report Monday, the anti-bullying advocate said that Vatican City’s healthcare plan doesn’t include birth control “because altar boys can’t get pregnant” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters readers are well-aware, Bill Maher says some astonishingly stupid things. He may have actually outdone himself Friday, for on HBO’s Real Time, the host actually said, “I think the Pope’s an atheist” (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

The New York Times may have rebuffed Attorney General Eric Holder’s off-the-record meeting with journalists about leak investigations, but they displayed how they really weren’t angry by burying an actual account of that meeting inside Friday’s paper, while the front page carried stories like “A New Step in Wrestling With the Bra.” Perhaps the most surprising judgment of what was front page-…

The New Republic has easily demonstrated just how ridiculous The Washington Post's book review of the new Dan Savage is to claim that  “reconciliation is at the heart of everything Savage writes and says.” In "The Waning Power of Dan Savage," Daniel D'Addario dismisses the new book as "a very public act of self-love." Later, he explained "The nadir of American Savage comes when Savage prints…

NPR could stand for Not Pro-Religion. It’s the taxpayer-subsidized network with the Wiccan-priestess reporter. On Friday’s All Things Considered, NPR promoted a new horror movie in which “it’s not the Devil that’s scary.” Instead, “the religious horror is religion itself.” NPR is pushing an “atheist’s take on Catholic horror.” Those teachings can be “terrifying.” (Disclaimer: NPR reserves…