CNA: Cardinal O’Brien accuses BBC of attempting to 'humiliate' Pope, says is time for religion editor

From CNA:

London, England, Sep 6, 2010 / 09:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the senior Catholic authority in Scotland, accused the BBC on Sunday  of  being contaminated by “a radically secular and socially liberal mindset.” Then prelate added that the public corporation headed by Mark Thompson, a 52-year-old Jesuit educated Catholic, should appoint a religion editor immediately.
Cardinal O'Brian, who is Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh also accused the BBC of plotting a “hatchet job” on the Vatican in a documentary about clerical sex abuse on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.
“This week the BBC’s director general admitted that the corporation had displayed ‘massive bias’ in its political coverage throughout the 1980s, acknowledging the existence of an institutional political bias,” the cardinal said.
“Our detailed research into BBC news coverage of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, together with a systematic analysis of output by the Catholic church, has revealed a consistent anti-Christian institutional bias,” he added.
As proof, Cardinal O'Brian pointed out to 15 percent decline in religious programming over the past 20 years. Also, he added, insiders at the BBC have privately admitted that there is a cultural intolerance of Christianity at the corporation.
“Senior news managers have admitted to the Catholic Church that a radically secular and socially liberal mindset pervades their newsrooms. This sadly taints BBC news and current affairs coverage of religious issues, particularly matters of Christian beliefs.”
The Archbishop of Edinburgh voiced his fears that the BBC will use a forthcoming documentary called "Benedict –Trials of a Pope" to "humiliate the Pontiff on the eve of his visit to Britain."  The program was created by Mark Dowd, a homosexual former Dominican friar, and will be aired on September 15.
The cardinal joined the recent Church of England's demand that the broadcaster appoint a religion editor to address the issue of the decline and the bias on religious information.
The BBC immediately dismissed Cardinal O’Brien’s criticism of its religious coverage. A spokeswoman told The Telegraph that “BBC news and current affairs has a dedicated religion correspondent.”
In fact, the BBC appointed Mr. Aaqil Ahmed last year as head of religious broadcasting, the first Muslim to hold that position.
Nevertheless,  Roger Bolton, who presents BBC's Radio 4’s "Feedback," said early this year at an awards ceremony in London that the religious perspective was often "bafflingly absent" both on air and behind the scenes in editorial discussions.
“BBC television, unlike BBC Radio, seems to be in the hands of the secular and skeptical, who view religious coverage as a rather tiresome obligation to be minimized rather than a rich and promising area to explore,” said Bolton.
He also noted that Aaqil Ahmed had a proven record in his previous job at Channel 4, but that at the BBC, his “playing field" was "more the size of a fives court than a football pitch.”
Bolton added that BBC News should appoint a religion editor of a similar seniority and prominence to business editor Robert Peston, to appear prominently on its radio and TV bulletins.
“BBC News requires a religion editor, able to appear on the networks to interpret the latest religious story at home and abroad, but more importantly to bring a religious perspective to the vast range of areas such as foreign affairs and medical dilemmas where that perspective is so often, and so bafflingly, absent,” said Bolton.

 With all due respect to the good cardinal, I highly doubt a religion editor will do much to root out the bias against Christianity at the BBC.  The network is so beholden to secularism, it'll take fundamental reform to root it out, and reform is painful.

Nevertheless, it's clear something needs to be done.  The attacks against the Holy Father leading up to his visit to the UK is a shameful episode and highlights the clear need for reform in the major media.

WT: Media blackout for Black Panthers

From the Washington Times

Where is the New York Times? Where is The Washington Post? Where are CBS and NBC? A whistleblower makes explosive allegations about the Department of Justice; his story is backed by at least two other witnesses; and the allegations involve the two hot-button issues of race and of blatant politicization of the justice system. A potential constitutional confrontation stemming from the scandal brews between the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A congressman highly respected for thoughtfulness and bipartisanship has all but accused the department of serious impropriety. By every standard of objective journalism, this adds up to real news.
Or it would be real news if a Republican Justice Department stood accused. It would be real news if the liberal media weren't mostly in the tank for our celebrated but failing first black president.
Tomorrow, the Civil Rights Commission will hear long-awaited testimony from J. Christian Adams, who resigned from the Voting Section of the Justice Department after the departmentcommission's lawful subpoena. Mr. Adams first told his story in public in these pages on June 28 and later did two major interviews with Fox News' Megyn Kelly. In those appearances, he flatly accused the Obama Justice Department of adopting an unlawful, immoral policy identified in previous Washington Times improperly ordered him to refuse compliance with the editorials - namely, enforcing civil rights laws against white perpetrators who victimized minorities but never against black perpetrators who victimize whites or Asians. If this is indeed the policy, it makes a scandalous mockery of the cherished American principle of "equal justice under the law."
All these allegations stem from what should have been a slam-dunk voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party videotaped in menacing behavior outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008. The Obama Justice Department dropped or seriously reduced all the charges or penalties in the case after it already effectively had been won. Mr. Adams' former colleague, longtime award-winning civil rights lawyer Christopher Coates, has been reported on multiple occasions to have backed Mr. Adams' version of events and of the Obama team's openly discriminatory policy.
If the department's motives are not racial or racist, Justice officials surely appear political. One of the Black Panthers against whom the department declined to press charges was an official poll watcher for the Democratic Party and an elected local party official. The department dropped charges just four days before another election, allowing him again to serve as a poll watcher.
Mr. Adams says the official most directly involved in dropping the case, Steven H. Rosenbaum - whose ethics have been subject to judicial sanction - refused to read his own team's legal briefs before deciding to dismiss the case. Mr. Adams accuses Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, of providing false answers in testimony to the Civil Rights Commission.
On a parallel track, The Washington Times has reported strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that department officials may have consulted the White House before dismissing the case. That possibility, too, cries out for investigation.
These broad policy questions and suggestions of political chicanery are important. Do we have a nation of laws equally applied to all, or is justice being reduced to raw politics? Investigating such questions is the essence of the news business. Failure to look into such a scandal is evidence of the institutional corruption of the much-ballyhooed "fourth branch of government," a supposedly independent media.

I can't really say I'm surprised at this.  For the longest time, the mainstream media has been interested only, seemingly, in news stories that advance the fantasy that America is still a bastion of racist hate, i.e. stories about criminal white supremacists, or whatever passes for them.

Now, we have a clear case of the New Black Panthers, a group that many consider to be the black version of the Ku Klux Klan, engaging in blatant voter intimidation, and the Justice Department refuses to do anything, and the media is silent?  Where are the articles and news features calling for an investigation and prosecution of those responsible?

I don't think that's an unreasonable question to ask.

Article copyrighted to The Washington Times.

Alert! Bigoted Poll Alert from Father Z.!

From WDTPRS

Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question was wrong.  Some questions are just plain dumb.

Like, say, "Should the Pope be charged with ‘crimes against humanity’, over the alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church?"


The whole "Benedict covered it all up" canard has by now been thoroughly debunked by both bloggers and the likes of the venerable National Catholic Register, and they're still on it in the MSM.


I normally don't advocate taking a page from the Ron Paul playbook and spamming polls, but in this case, I think I'll make an exception.  Catholics, spam away!