Media Bias

We know it's there. They're not telling us everything. And when I say "they" I mean all mainstream and cable media outlets (yes, even your favorite cable news channel--they're all guilty).

Take a look at the Vortex episode posted below that exposes just one blaring example of media bias. (The actual video starts at about 0.30 if you want to skip the ad & intro.)

If the mainstream and cable media outlets would withhold information in order to slant Republican primary results, can you imagine what else they're not telling us? When information is withheld from We the People, how can we possibly make the right decisions for ourselves, for our families, for this nation and for the future? If we're not getting the right information, or all the information, how can we tell when we're being lied to?

There are so many examples of media bias out there that it would take years to post them all, and quite frankly, we don't have that kind of time. In the sidebar of this blog (<= that one) is a link to CatholicVote.org. There you'll get truth in journalism and plenty of resources to help you vote your conscience.

More resources from a Catholic perspective:

Catholic Culture
Notes on the Culture Wars
Catholic Online
Catholic News Agency
RealCatholicTV: Catholic News Roundup

I also recommend surfing the web for alternative, privately owned resources for current events, as far too often subsidized and publicly-traded companies have a vested interest in serving and protecting their benefactors.

And if you be unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." Joshua 24:15

Secular Media Not Trustworthy on Religion

Archbishop: New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC Not ‘Trustworthy’ on Religion
By Michael W. Chapman

(CNSNews.com) – The news outlets CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and MSNBC do not “provide trustworthy information about religious faith,” said Philadelphia’s incoming Archbishop, Charles Chaput, at the Catholic World Youth Day ongoing this week in Madrid, Spain.

Chaput, the former Archbishop of Denver, made his remarks in an address on religious freedom to a group of more than 10,000 young pilgrims in Madrid on Wednesday. As initially reported in First Things, Chaput told the audience that, “In the United States, our battles over abortion, family life, same-sex ‘marriage,’ and other sensitive issues have led to ferocious public smears and legal threats not only against Catholics, but also against Mormons, evangelicals, and other religious believers.”

“And with relatively few exceptions,” he said, “the mass media tend to cover these disputed issues with a combination of ignorance, laziness, and bias against traditional Christian belief.”

The Archbishop continued: “We make a very serious mistake if we rely on media like the New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, or MSNBC for reliable news about religion. These news media simply don’t provide trustworthy information about religious faith -- and sometimes they can’t provide it, either because of limited resources or because of their own editorial prejudices.”

“These are secular operations focused on making a profit,” he said. “They have very little sympathy for the Catholic faith, and quite a lot of aggressive skepticism toward any religious community that claims to preach and teach God’s truth.”

Archbishop Chaput noted that the media gave a lot of coverage to the so-called “Arab Spring,” involving civil unrest in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. “But very little of that coverage has mentioned that the turmoil in Muslim countries has also created a very dangerous situation for Christians and other religious minorities across North Africa and the Middle East,” he said. “In Egypt, angry mobs have attacked Christian churches and monasteries, burning them to the ground and murdering the people inside.”

In addition, he said there has been widespread anti-Christian violence in Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia, but little news coverage of this in the U.S. media, adding that it is illegal to wear a crucifix or own a Bible in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, said the Archbishop, in Pakistan, “Christians face frequent discrimination, slander, beatings and even murder.”

Archbishop Chaput also warned that it is dangerous for democracy to force religion out of the public square.

“Forcing religious faith out of a nation’s public square and out of a country’s public debates does not serve democracy,” said the Archbishop. “It doesn’t serve real tolerance or pluralism. What it does do is impose a kind of unofficial state atheism. To put it another way, if we ban Christian Churches or other religious communities from taking an active role in our nation’s civic life, we’re really just enforcing a new kind of state-sponsored intolerance -- a religion without God.”

Archbishop Chaput was named by Pope Benedict XVI to head the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, starting on Sept. 8, 2011.

Catholicism on PBS

From Word on Fire:

In a breakthrough agreement, public television executives in Chicago have committed to prime-time broadcasts and nationwide distribution of Fr. Robert Barron's new CATHOLICISM documentary series this fall.

This is such great news. Can September come soon enough???

Media, Shmedia.

After watching 60 Minutes' interview with Abp. Dolan that aired last evening, I'm convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mainstream media in this country is garbage. From badgering Dolan about the sex abuse scandal (which cannot be compared to the exponential number of abusers and their cohorts found in every walk of life in this country who continue to fly safely under the radar of mainstream media and the authorities) to inciting division by repeatedly mislabeling Dolan the "American Pope", Morley Safer proved to be once again nothing more than a secular propagandist.

His introduction: "The past decade has been devastating for the Catholic Church; seemingly endless cases of sexual abuse..." SEEMINGLY endless; seemingly, as opposed to reality; what's relative as opposed to what's true. Pay attention to the words, and to the lack of facts. He offends me, and should offend every Catholic in his attempt to speak for the faithful-the REAL faithful.

I will not criticize His Excellency for his laughter, his lightheartedness, and for not saying more than he did, as it was quite obvious by the abrupt cuts in the dialogue that many of Dolan's remarks in this interview were edited out. I also give the Archbishop two thumbs up for not giving them anything to spin.


He made it very clear: The Church will not bend on the "settled questions".  Period.

If you'd like to see just how anti-Catholic both the media and this nation are, pick up a copy of Double Standard: Abuse Scandals and the Attack on the Catholic Church. (I'll be reviewing it over the next few weeks.)  Also,  Click here for Abp. Dolan's commentary on the historical Anti-Catholic sentiment found in America, which I would like to see someone in the mainstream media further explore. The fight to which Safer referred was when His Excellency called the Times out for lambasting the Church and Pope Benedict XVI for not defrocking a priest found guilty of extensive abuse, but never reporting that the abuse took place in the 1970's and the priest has been dead since 1988.

Media Responsibility

A few years ago, Sam Miller, co-chairman of Forest City Enterprises in Cleveland, OH, spoke at a First Friday Luncheon for the Diocese of Cleveland. He reminded his audience that in America, Catholics are a minority group, and as such, are subject to discrimination. Miller, who is Jewish, opened his speech with the following:

"I’m going to say things here today that many Catholics should have said 18 months ago. Maybe it’s easier for me to say because I am not Catholic but I have had enough, more than enough, disgustingly enough...During my entire life I’ve never seen a greater vindictive, more scurrilous, biased campaign against the Catholic Church as I have seen in the last 18 months, and the strangest thing is that it is in a country like the United States where there is supposed to be mutual respect and freedom for all religions."

This speech was given in 2003. Seven years later many everyday Catholics are still taking this ongoing media frenzy at face value and hanging their heads in utter shame.

My brothers and sisters, we mustn't be so afraid to defend the real truth about our faith. There is PLENTY of solid information--real statistics and facts--that clearly refute the misinformation being touted by the secular media about our Clergy. Take a look at the following excerpt from Miller's speech.   (All emphasis mine.  Read the speech in its entirety here.)

The Church today, and when I say the Church keep in mind I am talking about the Catholic Church, is bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. The agony that Catholics have felt and suffered is not necessarily the fault of the Church. You have been hurt by an infinitesimally small number of wayward priests that, I feel, have probably been totally weeded out by now. You see the Catholic Church is much too viable to be put down by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, take your choice, they can’t do it, they’re not going to do it and sooner or later they are going to give up, but you’ve got to make sure that you don’t give up first.

In 1799 a notice was placed in a French newspaper that a citizen Brachi had died in prison. Little did the people realize that this was Pope Pius VI who had occupied the Chair of Saint Peter for 25-years. He had been taken prisoner by Napoleon’s forces and died in prison as an indigent. At that time the thought was that this was the end of the Catholic Church, this was 200 and some odd years ago. And the reason was that there was no Pope to succeed him at that time. But you fooled them then, and we’re going to fool them again.

I’ve been talking more or less about the United States of America as far as the importance of the Church; let’s bring it home to Cuyahoga County and the seven surrounding counties. In education you save the county 420 million dollars per year. Wherever there’s a Church, and most other churches have fled the inner city, there’s a Catholic Church, and wherever there’s a Catholic Church there’s an absence of drug dealers. You talk to any bank that has real estate mortgages in the inner city, and they will tell you that the one thing that keeps up the value in that particular area is your Church. I’ve seen for example on Lorain near the Metro Catholic Schools there at the Church the nuns used to go out in the morning with brooms and sweep away the drug dealers from around the particular area. On Health and Human Services, the homeless, adoption, drugs, adult care and so on you saved the county 170 million dollars a year. At the end of the day the difference that your local Catholic institutions make in the eight counties that comprise this diocese are several billion dollars per year. Why don’t we hear about this? Why, because it’s good news. If some priest was caught with his hand in the collection plate it would be front page news. But the fact that you have thousands of students being education free, as far as the rest of the country is concerned doesn’t make news. Why? Because it is not newsworthy, it’s not dirty.

I'm not here to deny freedom of the press, but I believe that with freedom comes responsibility, and with rights you have an obligation. You cannot have rights that are irresponsible. Unfortunately our society today is protected by all rights and ruled by some of their wickedness. Anybody who expects to reap the benefits of freedom must understand the total fatigue of supporting it.

Television and news services are flat out being irresponsible in its obligation to the truth in the case of this "sex abuse scandal" within the Church.  As they continue to flood the world with a constant barrage of commentary and judgment against the Church and the Holy Father for the behavior of 1% of her priests named in less than 0.5% of sex abuse reports, the media is outright ignoring roughly 79,600 victims and hiding behind the First Amendment to do it.

You bet that's irresponsible.

Meditation, TV and the Reptillian Brain

I've been meditating on the following excerpts of Interior Castle rather intently for the last few days:

8. I, myself, have sometimes been troubled by this turmoil of thoughts. I learnt by experience, but little more than four years ago, that our thoughts, or it is clearer to call it our imagination, are not the same thing as the understanding...As the understanding is one of the powers of the soul, it puzzled me to see it so sluggish at times, while, as a rule, the imagination takes flight at once, so that God alone can control it by so uniting us to Himself that we seem, in a manner, detached from our bodies. It puzzled me to see that while to all appearance the powers of the soul were occupied with God and recollected in Him, the imagination was wandering elsewhere.

10. Whilst writing this I am thinking of the loud noise in my head which I mentioned in the Introduction, and which has made it almost impossible to obey the command given me to write this. It sounds as if there were a number of rushing waterfalls within my brain, while in other parts, drowned by the sound of the waters, are the voices of birds singing and whistling. This tumult is not in my ears, but in the upper part of my head, where, they say, is placed the superior part of the soul. I have long thought that this must be so because the flight of the spirit seems to take place from this part with great velocity.

 --The 4th Mansion, Ch 1.
Emphasis mine.

Not too many years ago, when I first got into marketing, I had to learn what triggers potential interest in various products. This research led me to, of course, television.  If you want to research this on your own, simply go to your favorite search engine and type the words TELEVISION BRAIN.

The first thing I learned is that there are three areas of the human brain, and that these areas are responsible for different forms of brain activity:

Neocortex, the highest form of brain activity where intellect, reason and imagination reside.

Limbic, the secondary form of brain activity where our feelings and reactions are processed.

Reptillian, the most basic form of brain activity best described as "survival mode".

I hope anyone who is reading or has read Interior Castle just had an A-HA moment when they got to the word "Reptillian".  (Teresa repeatedly refers to creatures living within the castles who would lead us out of prayer as reptiles).

In advertising, the goal is to trigger need for any given product, and essentially it's most desireable to cut through the intellect and emotion and go straight to that Reptillian brain. Television, as it turns out, is a magnificent device for this very goal, because by design TV does exactly this. No joke. It's been studied extensively since the 1960s.

When we're plopped down in front of the old idiot box, we respond to what we see on a very base level. EEG monitoring of brain activity detects a shift of certain thought patterns into a more passive state while watching television, regardless the program.

Other studies theorize a three-view process by which television drills information into our reptillian minds. The first time we see a show, film or commercial, we have a strong physiological response. A second viewing elicits a lesser response, and a third none at all. The second and third viewings reinforce the original response, because we remember the reaction we had when first exposed to the image. With "survival mode" reinforced, we alter our behavior accordingly, often in spite of our intellect. Television, therefore, can play a substantial role in conditioning our actions, beliefs and attitudes. Advertisers have used these theories for years. It's why many of you believe an engagement ring is supposed to cost two months salary.

The neocortex is rarely, if ever, engaged while watching television.

There are other factors thought to be involved as well. The rise in endorphin levels while watching television are compared to those in runners. Next time you watch CSI: Miami or some action film, be mindful of your physiological responses. Migraines are thought to be withdrawl symptoms when TV viewing suddenly decreases. Excessive television viewing has been suggested as a link to the rise of ADD, ADHD, Autism and other neurological disorders. All this before factoring in television content, which is further believed to cause behavioral problems in children and adolescents (read from any of the articles listed here), and intensifies conditions ranging from chronic depression to anger management issues in adults.

(Note: I found only one document refuting commonly held findings regarding TV's effects on the human brain, and surprise, it was produced from within the television industry. The Children's Television Network document titled "Television and the Brain: A Review" by Katherine V. Fite, contains little more than glorified "nuh-uh's" and a few creative spins on EEG results. I also found it rather disturbing that Fite chose to cite findings on adult subjects to disprove television's negative effects on the still-developing minds of children.)

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT TO MY SPIRITUALITY?

Review the excerpts from Interior Castle I posted at the beginning of this post. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church, describes the mind in prayer as using imagination and very high thought. She even discusses the physical location of our soul's activity as being in the front of the brain, which is where we find the neocortex. Prayer and meditation in the Catholic sense requires our intellect, imagination and ability to reason. While praying a Rosary, for example, we meditate on the life of Christ: we recall specific events, think about corresponding Scripture, try to imagine the details, and find meaning in these events for our own lives. Another example is Lectio Divinia, where we meditate on the meaning of a word, sentence or section of Scripture in many contexts order to fully understand what we've read. This kind of meditation requires the activity of the neocortex.

What can happen to my ability to pray if I'm spending 4 to 6 hours in front of the television, not using my neocortex, the very part of the brain that St. Teresa relies upon in order to experience Sweetness in Prayer (the title, by the way, of the chapter I quoted above)?

Think again about television being a delivery method of information into our reptilian brain. What about programming that exaggerates problems, distorts facts or presents revisionist historical information about faith, religion, our Church, God, Christ, Mary, priests, nuns, Catholics, morality...?

What about other programming? Network TV constantly pushes the morality envelope with content; cable tore through that envelope from the the word go. If our reptilian brain is conditioned to stop reacting to the immoral behavior we're seeing on TV, what happens to our moral compass?

If we don't shut the TV off long enough to intellectually process what we've watched, what will we become?

My husband and I talked about drastically limiting our television viewing as a Lenten sacrifice. The more I process all this information through my neocortex apart from the tube, the more convinced I am that we're on the right track.