Tag Archives: Topic: Media

AP: The survey, released on the International Day against Homophobia, is important, she said, because “for the first time, we see how much fear there is still around.”

National Catholic Register: Almost 20% of Americans say TV has shifted their opinion in favor of the redefinition of marriage.

Josh Israel at Think Progress: The Losing Arguments Of Anti-LGBT ‘Alliance Defending Freedom’

ADF testimony in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington all failed to sway legislators. Asked whether ADF believes its tact has been effective or swayed any lawmakers’ votes, legal counsel Jim Campbell told ThinkProgress: “First Amendment-protected freedoms are vital to the continued flourishing of our constitutional republic. They should not be ignored by state legislators who vote to redefine marriage. The failure to respect freedoms long-enshrined in our Constitution will lead to needless litigation. Sadly, even when those rights are eventually vindicated in court, the legal process will take a significant toll on innocent citizens who are simply trying to live in accordance with their conscience. Alliance Defending Freedom will be at the forefront of defending those Americans.”

National Religious Broadcasters Email (links to Alliance Defending Freedom press release): At the government’s own request, a federal appellate court has dismissed the Obama administration’s appeal of an order that stopped the President from enforcing his abortion pill mandate against Tyndale House Publishers.

Baptist Press at Townhall: Joining Winter in signing the letter are Land, Morality in Media President Patrick A. Trueman, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Alliance Defending Freedom President Alan Sears and Focus on the Family Senior Vice President Tom Minnery, among others. The letter urges Congress to make sure the FCC takes “seriously its duty to enforce federal law 18 U. S. C. 1464, limiting indecency and profanity on the publicly owned airwaves to times of day when children are much less likely to be in the audience.

LifeNews: Planned Parenthood, over the years, has run some pretty shocking ad campaigns. Without a doubt, this one is the worst I’ve ever seen . . .

Politico: Larry Conners, a veteran local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, says that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting him since an April 2012 interview he conducted with President Obama — a fact that he dismissed as coincidence until the recent reports about the IRS targeting conservative groups.

The Hill: Holder said he recused himself early on in the DOJ’s investigation of what he described as some of the most serious leaks from government officials that jeopardized national security.

The article by Steve Petrow at the NY Times is here.

The Hill: “Attorney General Eric Holder, in permitting the Justice Department to issue secret subpoenas to spy on Associated Press reporters, has trampled on the First Amendment and failed in his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution,” said Priebus in a statement.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Family planning agents are investigating China’s most famous film director for reportedly having 7 children with 4 women. If guilty of breaking China’s laws, Zhang Yimou could face $27 million in fines.

Fox News (AP): The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

Gallup: One-quarter of Americans say they have followed news of the case either very closely (7%) or somewhat closely (18%), but that is well below the 61% average level of attention Americans have paid to the more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured since 1991. An additional 20% of Americans say they are following it “not too closely” while 54% say “not at all.” This makes the Gosnell case one of the least followed news stories Gallup has measured.

NY Times: President Obama’s latest cabinet-level nominees are running into deep resistance in the Senate, pitching Democrats and Republicans into another tense standoff over White House appointments.

Christian Institute: Christian printer Nick Williamson explains why he is standing up to the bullies who are trying to force him to print a gay magazine.

CBS Sports: “Yes. Again, I have such great respect for our players,” Goodell said. “I don’t think it will just be tolerated, I think it will be accepted. These are individuals who play in our league. We’re all different in some fashion, and we’re accepting of our differences. That’s what this is all about.

Andrew Harrod at The Legal Project: Yet again depictions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad are causing controversy. The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo has published a special edition released in January 2013 entitled La Vie de Mahomet, 1ère partie: Les débuts d’un prophète (“The Life of Muhammad, Part One: The Debut of a Prophet”; part two will follow in June 2013). Press reaction in both France and Germany, however, has not been uniformly welcoming, demonstrating once more a media aversion to open examination of Islam.

World Magazine: In the spot, broadcast over major channels in the East African nation during commercial breaks until it was pulled in March, two Kenyan women walk to a market and linger over vegetables, talking about their families. One complains that she is tired of putting up with her alcoholic husband who does not satisfy her sexually. She confesses she has a lover on the side, who even has a name in the ad, Mbugua. Her friend advises her to always use condoms with Mbugua—leading to the campaign slogan “Weka Condom Mpangoni” or “include a condom in your planning” in Swahili.

LifeNews: Reports from the court now indicate none of the jurors saw the Fox News special so it appears that the issue will have no impact on the case.

Jerome Peters at Citizen-Times: Go to Alliance Defending Freedom and click on “Faith and Justice.’’ The choice is in the Christians’ end of the court. Obey God, get some new salt or reap the bad harvest coming around the corner. A very bad harvest it will be.

LifeNews: The defense attorney for abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell is furious about the Fox News special that aired Friday and Sunday nights exposing the gruesome abortions and infanticides that took place at his abortion clinic.

National Review: They say that ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homosexual’ is used and hurled at people who are gay as a slur,” Kornheiser explained, saying he was unaware of the issue but will use the network’s preferred word. ESPN has also singled out the term “sexual preference,” saying it wants employees to use “sexual orientation” instead.

LifeSiteNews: An American sports analyst for global TV network ESPN has stirred the left into a frenzy after expressing Christian views on homosexuality following a basketball star’s recent announcement that he is homosexual.

CBS: Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III took to Twitter on Tuesday to complain about the “tyranny of political correctness” he believes is holding American culture “hostage.”

Yahoo News (AP): ESPN says that it regrets the ”distraction” caused by one of its reporters who described Jason Collins as a sinner after the NBA center publicly revealed that he was gay.

Rush Limbaugh had this discussion regarding the Chris Broussard story.

LifeSiteNews: In his weekly column for Catholic Philly, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput takes aim at the nation’s primary national media for their “failure” and “allergic disinterest” in covering the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell.

Washington Post: This comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is out with a poll Tuesday morning looking at how much Americans know about the health-care overhaul—before a deluge of public outreach, set to begin this summer, kicks off.

The Hill: President Obama telephoned professional basketball player Jason Collins on Monday to congratulate him for coming out as the first openly gay player on a major U.S. sports team.

Washington Times: New undercover videos of abortion professionals explaining late-term abortions, coupled with states passing strict abortion laws and a horror-show abortion criminal case, are keeping abortion at the top of the news — an unexpected development after the nation re-elected its most vocal pro-choice president.

Raw Story: Two LGBT rights groups, the Human Rights Campaign and OutServe-SLDN, have launched a campaign to get Laurie removed as the headline speaker for the Pentagon’s Day of Prayer event on May 2. In a press release, the HRC noted that Laurie had a history of disparaging LGBT people and their relationships.

MyFoxNy.com: The NFL distributed a document to its teams Monday reiterating its anti-discrimination policy on sexual orientation.

Sports Illustrated: I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay. I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, “I’m different.” If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.

Delaware Online: A Glasgow church faced what it described as a “disturbance” after a sign out front implying religion trumps gay marriage caused a stir on social media.

Alan Sears at Townhall: The Play’s the Thing
Whatever you do, be cool,” the kids tell themselves, and each other—just as we told ourselves, and our peers, at that age. You can’t be cool if you stand out from the crowd. Rule No. 1 for being cool is: blend in. Makes it hard to teach showmanship. Or courage, for that matter.

Mark Steyn at NRO: One of the most ingenious and effective strategies of the Left on any number of topics is to frame the debate and co-opt the language so effectively that it becomes all but impossible even to discuss the subject honestly.

Breitbart: Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is panicked enough about the collapse of ObamaCare that they have hired a public relations firms at a cost of $8 million to sell the program to the public.

LifeSiteNews: The special program will air at 9 p.m. on Sunday, May 5, according to Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life.

LifeNews: President Barack Obama has backed out of giving a keynote speech at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser on Thursday night after massive pro-life pressure. As the Washington Times reports . . .

John Stemberger at Wash. Times: Virtually every news story on this topic erroneously frames this issue as the Boy Scouts “bans gays” or “discriminates against gays.” This is simply not true. Contrary to what the media might report, the Boy Scouts do not discriminate against homosexuals. The BSA membership application does not even ask about sexual orientation.

France24: French papers react to demonstrations yesterday for and against same-sex marriage. Left-leaning Libération says the anti-gay marriage camp is becoming more and more homophobic.

Emma Margolin at MSNBC: In a controversial resolution released on Friday, the group proposed lifting its ban on gay scouts–a significant shift in policy for one of the nation’s largest and most prominent youth development institutions–while still maintaining its current position excluding gay adults as potential leaders. If approved, the policy would take effect on Jan. 1, 2014.

Telegraph: Not so in France, where it’s turned incredibly French. It’s surprising to discover that, in a country with a proud tradition of secularism and political liberalism, only a slight majority of Frenchmen support the bill to legalise gay marriage that faces the National Assembly on Tuesday – and opinion is evenly split on a parallel bill to let gay people adopt children. More remarkable still has been the scale of the opposition’s street protests: the largest drew 340,000 to Paris in a demonstration of popular will normally associated with the Left. This has received very limited coverage in the European and American mainstream media, where there also seems to be a veritable blackout about the state’s violent response.

The Hill: Forty-one percent of Republicans polled said they think less favorably of Portman following his shift, and the percentage of respondents reporting an unfavorable view of the senator saw a sharp increase in the new poll, up to 21 percent from 8 percent in late February. His approval among Republicans has dropped six percentage points since the last poll.

Deseret News: Now think about that for a minute. This is the most famous newspaper in the world, the New York Times, in its popular and highly read Style section, not condemning Partilla and Riddell for deserting their families and children but featuring them positively because, instead of “denying their feelings and living dishonestly,” they had the courage to be “brave enough to hold hands and jump.”

Peter Sprigg at LifeSiteNews: In a country where 41 out of 50 states still define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and voters in a majority, 30 have placed that definition in their state constitutions; it can only be wishful thinking for the advocates of marriage redefinition to claim that it is imminent or inevitable. I suspect that some in the mainstream media are hoping that their prophecy will be a self-fulfilling one.

Rob Schwarzwalder at Life News: Abortion champion Andrew Rosenthal, who happens to be editorial page editor of what historically has been the nation’s flagship daily, The New York Times, has written a peevish, “how dare you question the Great Oz”-type op-ed defending his paper’s insubstantial coverage of the Kermit Gosnell trial.

Telegraph: Churches are facing a rebellion in the pews over gay marriage, a wide-ranging study of religious attitudes on the issue suggests.

Ed Whelan at National Review: Greenhouse is wrong that, in the cases against the HHS contraceptive mandate, plaintiffs “challenging the requirement for employer-provided health insurance to cover birth control almost invariably train their attack on emergency contraception.” There in in fact a general divide between the Catholic plaintiffs, whose objections apply to contraceptives as well as abortifacients, and the non-Catholic Christian plaintiffs, whose objections are indeed generally directed at the possible abortifacient effect of emergency contraceptives and of copper IUDs. But let’s unpack Greenhouse’s more serious errors and omissions:

Rasmussen: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 71% of American Adults say movies, TV and other parts of popular culture encourage sexual activity among young people. Only 18% disagree, while 11% are not sure.

LifeNews: Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Steve Scalise (R-LA) were joined by 70 of their House colleagues late Wednesday demanding national broadcast news channels ABC, NBC, and CBS stop blacking out coverage on high-profile abortion controversies.

Daniel Henninger at WSJ: Political correctness—the silent code that decides whose side of the story gets elevated and whose side gets buried—has been a blunt but effective weapon, which the dominant liberal culture has used to achieve a lot of victories over “them” the past 40 years. But the wins have come at a price. That price is the return of an unmistakable, growing and potentially destabilizing bitterness in American politics. A fairer-minded media would be the best way to level the playing field. Absent that, our politics will be leveled by other means. What the major media think then, if they’re still around, won’t matter.

Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture: During the 1960s the American understanding of marriage was radically altered by the public acceptance of divorce and contraception. Once divorce became socially acceptable, it was no longer possible to assume that any given marriage involved a permanent bond. Once contraception became the norm, it was no longer possible to assume that a marriage was likely to produce children. Permanence and fecundity are the two legs on which the institution of marriage stood; now they were gone. Today a typical American union is a 3-step process.

NY Daily News: Former First Lady Nancy Reagan supports same-sex marriage, her daughter Patti Davis claims. “She does,” Davis said when asked if her mother supported marriage equality.

Christian Institute: People feel forced to say they agree with gay marriage because campaigners have created a society where disagreement is “abnormal” according to an atheist commentator.

Examiner.com: No stories were originally done on Gosnell’s murder trial. Only lately has the mainstream media given a hint they may be watching. Casey Mattox, an attorney with the pro-life legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, noticed all the empty benches upon entering the courtroom.

John Fund at NRO: Now it’s time for journalists report on the “meat-market style” abortions at a Delaware clinic.

AP: Karnamaya Mongar survived 20 years in a refugee camp after fleeing war-torn Bhutan, but died months after arriving in the U.S. in 2009 and seeking an abortion

Juliet Eilperin at Washington Post: As abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell begins to draw national attention for how he ran his Philadelphia clinic, it raises a question: Can the allegedly egregious acts of one provider shift the broader abortion debate?

The Video is here.

James Taranto at WSJ: The New York Times has finally produced a second news story on the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell–almost a month after its other story, which briefly recapped the trial’s first day. Like the Times’s first story, which we cited in yesterday’s column, this one appears deep inside the paper (on page A12)

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: What accounts for the media’s lack of interest in a trial that not only is sensational but implicates the most divisive social and political issue in America? PJMedia.com’s Roger L. Simon has the answer: “The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself.” . . . The reductio ad absurdum of the pro-abortion side is Kermit Gosnell. That is why the Gosnell case has crystallized our view that the current regime of abortion on demand in America is a grave evil that ought to be abolished.

NBC: By a 49 percent to 43 percent margin, Latinos say they are in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. That’s the widest margin for Hispanics in the NBC/WSJ poll’s history, but it lags behind other traditionally Democratic-voting pillars.

Jeremy Dys at Engage Family Minute: And, just because it seems inevitable, maybe its not. Maybe we need to explain to our kids how formerly ‘inevitable’ ideas like Beta, VHS tapes, and the bag phone ultimately lost their novelty too.

Doug Mainwaring at Public Discourse: Our recent juridical and legislative history is rife with assaults on the rights and needs of children, always trumped in favor of selfish adults. No more. I am confident that the naked overreach of the media and progressive activists on this issue will invite a voter backlash that will either meet or exceed the same-sex marriage movement’s achievements, leading to a thorough rethinking of Roe v. Wade, no-fault divorce, and our debilitating, anti-family, anti-father welfare state.

LifeNews: As week five of the Gosnell trial is set to begin on Monday morning, the weekend saw a flood of news articles and blog stories concerning the gruesome murder trial after it was essentially ignored by the mainstream media for four weeks. The coverage was prompted by a “Tweet-Up” that trended in the number one spot on Twitter most of the day on Friday.

AP: The murder trial of a Philadelphia abortion provider enters its fifth week Monday, but it will be days if not weeks before the defense starts presenting its case.

Jena McGregor at Washington Post: It’s also not leadership. The abrupt surge of officials trying to follow political winds is the opposite of the sort of courageous, principled way most of us hope our officials will lead. Rather than speak out about their true beliefs — it’s impossible to believe at least some of these 14 senators didn’t privately support gay marriage before — they waited until they had the political air cover of Hillary Clinton, one of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party.

Ruth Institute: Truth is, African American pastors have been engaged in the real civil rights battle for decades, fighting to end violence and respect human dignity in their communities, while largely ignored by the media. Now that their voices are speaking out on the hot button issue of marriage law, they’re getting attention. But some media seemed not to have noticed that the day they gave the story prominence was the anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Oh, the irony.

MPR: The study from the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at UCLA School of Law found support for gay marriage in Minnesota at 43 percent.

AP on ABC13: Moving babies’ spines snipped at abortion clinic – witness

PressTV.ir: An Iranian lawmaker has called on the West to put an end to acts of Islamophobia as infamous US Pastor Terry Jones plans to desecrate the Holy Quran by burning it.

Shannen W. Coffin at NRO: The horrible truth that the National Abortion Federation or Planned Parenthood or any other abortion apologist wants to hide is that Kermit Gosnell is not an outlier.

LifeNews: Wikipedia, the online dictionary and research web site utilized by millions of people every day, is considering deleting the entry associated with Kermit Gosnell, the infamous abortion practitioner on trial for murder.

Out.com has published the list here. Many conservatives will be surprised to see that Matt Drudge is identified as number 21.