-Luke Russert: Media Is Biased Against ‘People Of Faith’

We have long contended that the American main stream media shows a great deal of ignorance and bias against Christians and people of faith. That bias is admitted to and addressed in an interview with Luke Russert of NBC News. From the CBN Brody File:

Courtesy: CBN News/The Brody File

David Brody: “Does the media have some sort of bias against whether it be a strong conservative evangelical or maybe a strong Catholic, people of faith. It seems if you where it on your sleeve too much you can get bit to a degree.”

Luke Russert: “I think that’s absolutely accurate and I think the current world in which we live in, specifically with the American media ‘snark’ is valued. And it’s very easy to come after people of faith no matter what they’re religion is.”

Luke Russert: “You’re sort of tagged with this label of being puritanical and not understanding of others and different viewpoints…

Response: That bias seems rather obvious to most Christians and yet not so much for many more secular folks who see it as a normal skeptical way of thinking and talking about religion and religious people.

In the last 10 years in particular that ‘bias’ has begun to  affect the accuracy of media stories on religion and the church.  Really from my perspective it is not so much bias as it is ignorance due to the fact that so few in the media now are actually ‘religious’ and participate in any kind of organized religion or church.

That ignorance was particularly poignant recently when the Pope Francis stated that the church should be reaching out in love and ministering to all people including homosexuals.  The stories in the media that followed crowed that the new Pope was changing the church’s policy towards homosexuality. In reality he was only stating the age-old mission of the Christian church to love and minister to everyone regardless.

Another occasion where media ignorance was on display when it comes to the Catholic Church and the Pope in particular were all of the stories that followed the choosing of the new Pope and the realization that the new Pope was ‘gasp’ actually ‘Catholic’ and was going to follow the traditional beliefs and teachings of the church. Here’s a post I did evaluating some of the crazy media responses to the new Pope: 

-Yes Virginia, The New Pope is Actually Catholic

In fact there is a very popular blog dedicated to exposing media bias and ignorance when it comes to religion and people of faith. The writers never run out of material  and it is one of my favorite sites:  Get Religion

Ironically I just noticed that they are featuring this same interview today on their site.              *Top