by Brian Fitzpatrick, Senior Editor, Culture and Media Institute

The following article first appeared in the May 20, 2008 edition of “Culture Links,” the e-mail newsletter of the Culture and Media Institute. You can sign up for Culture Links on CMI’s informative website:

The Supreme Court of the nation’s largest state redefined the most important relationship in human society, marriage, and the networks lost interest in the story in one weekend.

On Thursday, California’s top court issued its decree ordering California to allow same-sex couples to “marry.” The networks carried the story on their Thursday evening broadcasts, but by Sunday, only one of the Big Three networks’ weekly public affairs shows bothered to discuss it. ABC’s This Week devoted a paltry two minutes to this monumentally important topic.

The liberal media treated the story one-dimensionally, as an historic victory for civil rights and the inevitable wave of the future, with a brief quote or two from opponents as a sop to balance. This isn’t surprising, given the media’s commitment to the homosexual agenda.

CMI Report “Apostles of Atheism” documents how media spread ‘Gospel of Godlessness ‘ in 2007

The following is the Executive Summary of the Culture and Media Institute’s (CMI) special report, “Apostles of Atheism: How the broadcast and print media helped spread the Gospel of Godlessness in 2007,” by Kristen Fyfe. Click HERE for the full report in HTML, and you can view the PDF Version HERE.

[Related AFTAH articles: “Chuck Norris on the Marketing of Atheism to Young People”; “Homosexuality and Atheism.”]

CMI’s Fyfe writes (emphasis added):

_____________________________

By Kristen Fyfe, Culture & Media Institute

Only eight percent of Americans are atheists, according to the National Cultural Values Survey,* yet atheism was the “it” religion in 2007, with just three best-selling books generating much of the media coverage. Christianity Today put the topic at No. 2 in its Top 10 list of religion stories for last year. “The Roar of Atheist Books” was the seventh biggest religion story of 2007 according to Time magazine.

Media indifference and even hostility toward religion in general and Christianity in particular has been well documented by the Media Research Center for years. With the ascendancy of atheism as a “religion” story, the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute wondered whether the media gave atheism the same degree of scrutiny as Christianity and other religious faiths? To assess the news media’s coverage of atheism in 2007, CMI examined the morning, evening, late night and weekend news programs on all three broadcast networks, all issues of the three leading weekly news magazines (Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report), and four programs aired on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation).

Brothers and Sisters is the first network series to showcase a same-sex union between regular characters. The show continues the network’s taboo-busting – or standards-eroding – trend in entertainment and news programming.

By Kristen Fyfe
Culture and Media Institute
May 9, 2008

Kevin and Scotty will exchange vows on the season finale of ABC’s Brothers and Sisters Sunday night. And the actor who plays “Kevin,” Matthew Rhys, told USA Today, “It’s all very progressive, evolved and about time.”

In a story about the atypical TV wedding, USA Today’s reporter William Kleck mentioned that the show is “liberal leaning” but “does attempt to recognize those who oppose gay “marriage” by introducing Scotty’s parents, who skip the ceremony. That volatile relationship is expected to be explored in Season 3.”

Kleck also mentioned that another character’s children will witness the gay commitment ceremony and the actress who plays the mom hopes viewers won’t “have a problem with that.”

Click HERE to read the rest of the CMI story

Who needs April Fool’s Day jokes when you’ve got the radical ‘trans-agenda’?

Dear Readers: check out this recent Good Morning America story (you can watch the ABC video online) about an alleged “pregnant man” — who is actually a very gender-confused Oregon woman who is pregnant but has taken drastic measures to appear like the “man” she wants to be. What continues to irritate us in the reporting on the radical “trans-genda” is the media’s obsequiousness in using biologically false pronouns to describe the stories’ subjects. Of course, this is the exact goal of radical groups like GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and GenderPAC.

Breaking news to the PC media: Laurie Higgins is right: men still cannot get pregnant.– Peter LaBarbera

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By Laurie Higgins

I’ve said this before, but in light of a recent “news” story that describes the strange tale of a “pregnant man,” I think it bears repeating.

Prior to my mother succumbing to cancer, she had had an oophorectomy, hysterectomy, and mastectomy. Following those surgeries, she was no less a woman than am I. The presence in the pregnant woman of a desire to be a man, a clear symptom of a profound psychological disorder, and even the foolish legal accommodation of this symptom, renders this woman a man only in an illusory post-modern fantasy–not in reality where most of us live and breathe and have our being. That is to say, there exists no pregnant “man.”

Oh, and by the way, I still believe I’m a hobbit trapped in a human body.

Laurie Higgins is a writing instructor at Deerfield High School, in Deerfield, Illinois, north of Chicago. She can be reached through AFTAH at americansfortruth@comcast.net.

Friends, heads up: ABC’s “Boston Legal” tonight (10:00 P.M. EST) will help further the radical “gay” agenda of opening up the America’s Armed Forces to open homosexuals — during wartime, no less.
 
The homosexual-bisexual-transsexual movement hypes its victimhood but it has incredible power and money as a small special interest group in society. At bottom, a well-heeled homosexual activist group, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), touts the “Boston Legal” episode, which probably could have been written by the SLDN itself, such is the propagandistic nature of pop culture today. If I were a gambler, I’d wager that the script advances the bogus “gay” activist analogy to ending racial discrimination and makes conservative opponents of homosexuals in the military out to be a “bigots” and irrational “homophobes.”

 This FOX News Channel ad ran in the program guide of the recent National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association conference in San Diego. 

The following is Allyson Smith’s first installment on the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) conference in San Diego — which she attended representing Americans For Truth. Note the casual mixing of homosexual media with “mainstream” media – all sharing and strategizing around a pro-gay perspective — and the complete lack of opposing voices present at the NLGJA panels. (Allyson tells me that at one panel on “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell,” the moderator said that opponents of homosexuals in the military were invited to speak but declined to attend.)

All this begs the question of whether homosexual reporters working in establishment media can truly be objective — i.e., fair and balanced —  especially when they are assigned to cover homosexual-related issues. Also, note that for ease of reading, we have not put quote marks around the word “gay” as we would normally do. – Peter LaBarbera

By Allyson Smith

Gay Activists & Journalists Mingle and Strategize Together at National Gay Journalists Conference: Day 1 at the NLGJA

On Thursday, August 30, I attended the first of three days of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention, held at the Westin Horton Plaza Hotel in downtown San Diego. Although I have been to many homosexual conferences and events since the dawn of the millennium, at times using my real name and at other times an assumed name, this would be my first time to attend such a convention as a totally “out” Christian conservative reporter under the auspices of an organization many homosexual activists hate: Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), headed by longtime pro-family activist Peter LaBarbera.

   The photo at right appeared in the homosexual newspaper Dallas Voice’s story on Allyson Smith, who attended the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists (NLGJA) conference in San Diego representing Americans For Truth. Smith received a lot of attention at the annual event as a lone voice opposed to homosexuality. The NLGJA event is financed and sponsored each year by “mainstream” media corporations, including FOX News, which also recruited there. 

The following article first appeared on the blog of Mike Heath, who directs the Christian Civic League of Maine, and who is Chairman of the Board of Directors at Americans For Truth. As one who has both attended several National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) conferences (openly, as a critic), and even spoken as a panelist at one, I will add that the NLGJA events have an odd mix of activism and journalism. They prominently feature activists like Besen who can fairly be described as pro-homosexual culture warriors, but they also are attended by professional journalists who claim to be objective, mostly as open homosexuals. (I would suspect that the typical media consumer has no clue that the NLGJA reporter they’re reading, watching, or listening to is “gay.”) 

Wayne’s predictable jibes are far less important than the question of whether openly (or “closeted”) homosexual journalists can cover homosexuality-related issues with any semblance of objectivity and fairness. — Peter LaBarbera 

A ‘Christian Crusader’ amidst the World of ‘Gay Journalism’
By Mike Heath | September 7, 2007

Most of us don’t even know that there is such a thing as a homosexual press.  If someone told us there was one we’d look at them askance and wonder which airport bathroom stall they just crawled out of.  Alas, not only is there such a thing … it is thriving.  How do I know?  It wasn’t FoxNews that told me.  Turns out FoxNews sponsors the homosexual press, and recruits from their ranks.  Fox was one among many familiar news sources who showed up to sponsor the National Gay and Lesbian Jounalist Association convention in San Diego a couple weeks ago.

One intrepid truth teller took time to show up.  Allyson Smith, a San Diego resident, attended the entire conference representing (openly) Americans For Truth.  It is important to know that Allyson lives in San Diego.  Truth tellers about homosexuality in the west have learned to live on fund-raising fumes.  It is harder to raise funds for truth telling about homosexuality than it is for Larry Craig to figure out his “intent.”  If Smith didn’t live in San Diego, the important and underrated organization Americans for Truth wouldn’t have had anybody at the conference.  They don’t have the money.  It is easy to raise money by loving all things gay, hating gays or helping gays.  It is hard to raise money to tell the truth about the so-called “gay” movement.

Send your check today to Americans for Truth by visiting their website HERE.

Approximately 500 journalists, editors, producers, travel writers, bloggers and other communications workers from homosexual and mainstream media outlets gathered August 30 – September 2 for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) annual conference.

As at past NLGJA conferences, conservative-leaning Fox News Network was among the sponsors and recruiters.

Titled “Breaking Stories, Breaking Waves,” the convention, held in downtown San Diego’s Westin Horton Plaza hotel, featured a one-day LGBT media summit, six receptions, and more than 50 sessions and workshops ranging from “Covering LGBT Conservatives” (oddly, the Christian-conservative-bashing Wayne Besen was a panelist), to “Will Gays Matter in ’08?” to “Sex Writing for Fun and Profit.”

Attendees included print and broadcast professionals from top U.S. mainstream news agencies such as CNN, Associated Press, ABC/Primetime, NBC, CBS, Fox News Network, Hearst Newspapers, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bloomberg News, Newsday, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, CNBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Time Warner/Turner Broadcasting, Washington Post, Hartford Courant, People Magazine, NPR, Clear Channel Communications, Wired Magazine, Cox Enterprises, and USA Today.

Among major homosexual media outlets represented were the Washington Blade, Dallas Voice, San Diego’s Gay and Lesbian Times, GO Magazine, Gay News Watch, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Bay Area Reporter, IN Los Angeles Magazine, Sirius OutQ Radio, CBS News on LOGO, and here! Networks.

Other organizations who sent employees to the convention, according to an attendee directory distributed with the registration package, included Cirque de Soleil; MGM Mirage; USC Annenberg School of Communications; Human Rights Campaign (HRC); Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund; Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN); Arizona State University Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication; JetBlue Airways; Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; several Canadian tourism agencies; Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN); Lambda Legal; Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation; Out and Equal Workplace Advocates; Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The convention included plenary sessions on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and immigration issues affecting homosexuals, as well as a general session featuring a conversation with Larry Kramer, founder of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), a radical, “in your face” demonstration group that made headlines in December, 1989, for disrupting a Catholic Mass and destroying a consecrated Communion host at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

The Canadian Tourism Board was the presenting sponsor for the convention. Other sponsors included JetBlue Airways, CBS News, CNN, ESPN, General Motors, Toyota automobiles, Orbitz, Bloomberg, Coca-Cola,  the Gill Foundation, Sony Pictures and Television, visitBritain, ABC News, Fox News Network, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Washington Post.

Among “Career & Community Expo” participants were the Associated Press, Dow Jones, Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, MGM Mirage, Reuters, Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, the New York Times, Fox News Network, and NBC Universal.

Other events occurring during the convention included a student projects, a documentary film screening, a “not so silent” auction, 12-step meetings, and a “San Diego Night Out.”

Americans For Truth sent reporter Allyson Smith to the convention for three days, where she attended more than a dozen sessions and raised issues of concern to pro-family advocates — including the biased manner in which “mainstream media” covers homosexuality-related issues. A full report about the sessions that Smith attended will follow in coming days.