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News

What does the mainstream media think about religion and morality?

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Newsbusters analyzed how the mainstream media covered Rick Perry’s day of prayer.

Excerpt:

On both Good Morning America and World News, two different ABC correspondents filed separate reports recounting that some Christians oppose Texas Governor Rick Perry’s prayer rally from the weekend, but, in both reports, clips of left-wing figures like the Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and Drew Courtney of People for the American Way were shown, instead of showing any more mainstream Christians as examples of dissent.

And at one point on World News, ABC’s Aaron Katersky asserted that the American Family Association opposes “women’s rights,” presumably referring to “abortion rights,” as he noted:

The sponsor of Perry’s rally, the American Family Association, opposes homosexuality, women’s rights and religious diversity.

The ABC journalists quote “mainstream” Christians from radical secular leftist groups like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way. This would be like quoting Josef Stalin as a “mainstream capitalist” and Nancy Pelosi as a “mainstream conservative”. But that’s what you get from the media – pure propaganda meant to marginalize those who they disagree with as mean-spirited and extreme.

We need to be more careful about the worldview of the secular left, and be mindful about what is causing them to write their propaganda.

Many on the secular left think that unborn children deserve the same protection under the law as cockroaches have (abortion). Many of them think that children should be raised without a mother or without a father (same-sex marriage). Many of them think that religious liberty should be curtailed because some people are offended by moral rules that prohibit things like polygamy. Many of them think that children who are raised by Christians should be seized by the government and placed into public schools. Many of them think that no-fault divorce and single motherhood by choice is just fine for children and doesn’t hurt them at all. And so on.

It’s important to realize where the secular left is coming from. They are not going to come out and say what they believe about abortion, marriage, religious liberty, etc. They are just going to nit-pick on Christians for being “mean” and “judgmental”. They marginalize conservative values and theological views by focusing on the feelings of “victims” who are offended. Instead of arguing against God’s existence on scientific grounds, they’ll portray reckless, sinful people as being “victims” because they are made to feel bad by those nasty Christians for behaving selfishly and hurting others. They’ll never explain what they really hate about Christians – moral prohibitions on sin and moral accountability after death.

People on the secular left just don’t like being told that anything they do is wrong, and that God will hold them accountable for their selfishness. It’s important to understand the “isms” that animate the secular left: postmodernism, moral relativism, universalism. That’s what is driving these “Christians are mean and judgmental for thinking that God is real and for holding to objective moral standards” stories. They don’t want to feel bad for sinning, so they undermine the credibility of the one group that actually believes in right and wrong: evangelical Christians.

The facts about media bias

Here’s a UCLA study on media bias.

Excerpt:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.”

Here’s a Harvard University study on media bias.

Excerpt:

The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture… of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).

When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.”

From the Washington Examiner, a study of the political contributions made by the mainstream media.

Excerpt:

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

[…]The data on contributions by broadcast network employees was compiled by CRP at the request of The Examiner and included all 2008 contributions by individuals who identified their employer as one of the three networks or subsidiaries. The data does not include contributions by employees of the three networks who did not identify their employer.

The CRP is the organization behind OpenSecrets.org, the web site that for more than a decade has put campaign finance data within reach of anybody with an Internet connection.

President Obama received 710 such contributions worth a total of $461,898, for an average contribution of $651 from the network employees. Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain received only 39 contributions totaling $26,926, for an average donation of $709.

And more from a study done by the radically leftist MSNBC.

Excerpt:

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

The donors include CNN’s Guy Raz, now covering the Pentagon for NPR, who gave to Kerry the same month he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq; New Yorker war correspondent George Packer; a producer for Bill O’Reilly at Fox; MSNBC TV host Joe Scarborough; political writers at Vanity Fair; the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition; local TV anchors in Washington, Minneapolis, Memphis and Wichita; the ethics columnist at The New York Times; and even MTV’s former presidential campaign correspondent.

And here’s a bit from that same article about The New Yorker:

The last bulwark against bias’s slipping into The New Yorker is the copy department, whose chief editor, Ann Goldstein, gave $500 in October to MoveOn.org, which campaigns for Democrats and against President Bush. “That’s just me as a private citizen,” she said. As for whether donations are allowed, Goldstein said she hadn’t considered it. “I’ve never thought of myself as working for a news organization.”

Those are the facts.

So what?

Now consider this column from Brent Bozell, which explains the difference media bias makes to political intelligence.

Excerpt:

The Republican presidential contest is picking up steam. Obama is consistently polling under 50 percent. This one’s a toss-up, and in the thick of it is the Fox News Channel. It’s not just their role in hosting and vetting the candidates. It’s their role as the chief villain in the eyes of liberal Democrats struggling to push their version of the “truth” about Obama.

Jon Stewart rhetorically asked Chris Wallace about Fox on “Fox News Sunday, because he thought he knew the answer: ”Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

In the real world – outside Stewart’s smug bubble – this is garbage. A 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center asked media consumers three questions: which party was in control of Congress (Democrats), who was the secretary of state (Condi Rice) and who was the prime minister of Britain (Gordon Brown).

Let’s document how the viewers of “Hannity &Colmes” were better informed than Stewart’s “Daily Show”  gigglers on basic political facts. Hannity viewers beat Stewart’s on the Democratic majority (84 percent to 65 percent correct answers), Condi Rice (a dramatic 73 percent to 48 percent gap) and Gordon Brown (49 percent to 36). Overall, as a percentage getting all three questions right, Hannity won 42-30.

Just keep that in mind when you are watching the mainstream media news shows. A very good site to bookmark and read is Newsbusters, which documents mainstream media bias daily. I even have an RSS feed of their latest stories on the front page on this blog.

UPDATE: New York Times cites abortion advocates as neutral sources.

News

Do mainstream journalists understand the controversy over human origins?

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When it comes to evolution, liberal and conservative commentators often have no idea what the controversy is actually about.

James Klinghoffer explains in this post on Evolution News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Among hot-button controversies of the day, Darwinian evolution may be unique in being a question on which people express forceful opinions all the time, at high levels of the media and politics, all under a protocol where it’s the norm to have not even a basic idea what you’re talking about.

So Wall Street Journal online columnist James Taranto tries to take to task author Jacob Weisberg for Weisberg’s column on Slate that includes this derisive reference to Republicans in Congress:

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science.

Weisberg has demonstrated ignorant prejudice in the past. He has written elsewherethat intelligent design is the assertion “that gaps in evolutionary science prove God must have had a role in creation.” But Taranto, a conservative, seems to understand even less than Weisberg.

He nicely offers that Weisberg could be more polite in casting insults:

Darwin is a red herring here. Although disparaging people for holding harmless religious beliefs as “intellectual primitives” is awfully uncivil, we agree with Weisberg that people who “reject” the theory of natural selection are mistaken.

I’ve never met a single person, nor heard of one, who “rejects” natural selection. This is not a matter of science but of sociology: They do not exist.

If anyone did reject natural selection, they would be not only “mistaken” but probably delusional. In reality, the evolution debate turns, in part, on the question of how much of life’s history can be explained in the neo-Darwinian terms of natural selection operating unguided on chance genetic variation. Darwin skeptics argue, not on the basis of “religious beliefs” whether harmless or otherwise, that the development of complex life may be explained in this Darwinian fashion only up to a point.

Read the rest.

If you are reading an article about intelligent design and evolution, and it is devoid of references to specified complexity, probability bounds and protein sequences, then stop reading that article. If the article contains any mention of God or the Bible, then it is also a useless article, because the controversy is about what the scientific evidence shows – not about religion.

Intelligent design is a scientific theory. Opposition to evolution is based solely on scientific concerns. There should be no talk of “beliefs” in articles about evolution and ID. There should only the experimental results showing what natural causes can and cannot do to produce certain effects in nature, like functional proteins. Either we have the means to create these effects using natural mechanisms, or we require intelligent causes to explain them (as in other sciences, like archaeology). That is the issue. Unfortunately, most journalists don’t know that, because they are not reading any science books written in the last 20 years.

To understand intelligent design, read this FAQ. Then read “Signature in the Cell” by Stephen C. Meyer.

Commentary

Is redistribution of wealth a substitute for marriage and family?

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From MercatorNet. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The circumstances of the half-million indigenous people of Australia are quite varied, from integration in capital cities to isolated outback townships where people barely speak English. But they are united in being disadvantaged. Life expectancy for Aboriginal men and women is about 10 years less than non-indigenous Australians. Other indices of social welfare – employment, education, housing, infant mortality – are appalling. It would paint a rosy picture to describe some Aboriginal settlements as Third World. They are Fourth World camps with unimaginable levels of squalor, domestic violence, child sex abuse, drunkenness, and drug abuse.

[…]…over the past 40 years, the conditions of indigenous people, relative to the rest of Australia, have hardly changed. Not that the government has been sitting on its hands. In fact, as a scathing review of the effectiveness of its programmes showed this week, it has been busy spending money hand over fist — A$3.5 billion a year for many years. And, says the report, these billions have “yielded dismally poor returns to date”.

“The history of Commonwealth policy for Indigenous Australians over the past 40 years is largely a story of good intentions, flawed policies, unrealistic assumptions, poor implementation, unintended consequences and dashed hopes. Strong policy commitments and large investments of government funding have too often produced outcomes which have been disappointing at best and appalling at worst.”

How to raise the standard of living of indigenous people is bitterly disputed. This vast and intractable morass has defeated generations of government bureaucrats, both white and indigenous. Unhappily, as the report acknowledges, “good intentions in Indigenous affairs do not translate easily into good policy, and … the risk of unintended consequences in this domain is often extremely high.”

There is one promising approach on the table – to abandon the welfare mentality to which so many Aborigines are addicted. Some Aboriginal leaders, like Noel Pearson and Galarrwuy Yunupingu are trying to convince their people and the Federal and state governments that less sit-down money is needed, not more. They argue forcefully that welfare is a poison which is killing their people.

[…]But both governments and these impressive leaders have failed to address a central issue– the state of the Aboriginal family. For decades, the government has tried to give its indigenous citizens everything they needed to access the benefits of a developed economy: education, housing, health care and so on. But it withholds the pincode, which is the traditional Western family.

All the indices for Aboriginal families are dire. About 70 percent of indigenous mothers have never been married. The vast majority of children are born out of wedlock. If Aboriginal families are dysfunctional, is it any wonder that literacy levels are in the basement and drug and alcohol abuse is sky-high?

For the bureaucrats, the figures for indigenous marriage are far less important than those for literacy or health. There are probably two reasons for this. For one, they are loath to criticise customary marriage — even though it includes polygamy and child brides – lest they appear paternalistic and patronising. But the main reason must surely be that marriage is not important for them either. The high rates of divorce, co-habitation, and single-motherhood in white Australia do not trouble them.

[…]If Aborigines had strong families, their child mortality rates and maternal mortality rates would not be the same as East Timor or the Solomon Islands.

What is happening, effectively, is we are shutting Aboriginals out of Australian society by refusing to promote the most powerful social technology of all: the traditional nuclear family. Families teach orderliness, self-restraint, industriousness, ambition, respect for others’ rights – all the virtues that children need to be healthy, to take advantage of their education and to succeed in working life.

The reason why left-wing bureaucrats are opposed to strengthening marriage is because they don’t like the differing gender roles that are inherent in marriage, they don’t like chastity and sexual restraint, and they don’t like people having the ability to make a living independent of the state. If there was no “crisis” to solve, then how could the compassionate left get elected? How could they feel good about themselves by redistributing other people’s wealth and imposing their enlightened values on the poor? They need to create the crisis – they don’t want to solve it. Subsidizing risky and reckless behavior just throws gasoline on the fire – which is exactly what the left wants. They don’t like religion. They don’t like morality. They don’t think that people should feel bad about being immoral. They don’t care about encouraging people to be careful about conceiving and raising children. They care about getting elected and being perceived as generous. And they will only be stopped when people see that redistributing wealth is not as good as helping the poor to make their own way in the world – to earn their own success, independent of the state’s social programs.

We need to realize that the secular left elites are not wise, and they are not good. They do not have a plan to do good, they do what makes them feel good. They are not helping the poor, they are helping themselves. Undermining religion and morality while favoring dependence on government does not help the poor.