Why Does MSNBC Invite Anti-Gay Liars on TV to Represent Christians?

I have long lamented the laziness and irresponsibility of the main stream media ("MSM") that results in anti-gay bigots and Christianists who lack any legitimate credentials being given platforms as either representatives of everyday Christians and/or "experts" on social issues, especially those pertaining to homosexuality. Would the MSM invite the Imperial Wizard of the Klux Klux Klan on to talk about the threat posed by blacks who seek civil equality? Or neo-Nazi leaders to talk about Jewish Americans? I think not, yet we see the precise equivalent time and time again when extreme Christianists and hate group leaders are brought on to TV news programs and allowed to spew lies and untruths while never being challenged. It's one thing when this travesty occurs on Fox News. It's something far different when the offending networks are CNN, MSNBC and the three main networks. A group called Faithful America has shouted out "enough is enough" and launched a petition addressed to MSNBC demanding that hate group leader and white supremacist lover Tony Perkins cease being provided a platform by MSNBC. Sign the petition here (I've already signed it). Here are highlights from the Faith in Public Life that looks at what lead to the petition effort againstMSNBC:

MSNBC is in the news this week for announcing that they may finally be ending their contract with contributor Pat Buchanan, who has come under fire in the last month (deservedly) for publishing another book with incendiary racist commentary. Led by Color of Change and CREDO Action, hundreds of thousands of people pressured MSNBC to fire Buchanan. This latest update suggests MSNBC finally listened to their concerns.

Unfortunately, Buchanan wasn’t the MSNBC’s only problematic regular contributor. As Media Matters has tracked, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins has appeared on the network 18 times in the past year alone–almost as often as he’s gone on Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has rightfully declared Family Research Council a hate group because of their consistent, unwavering commitment to spreading hateful lies about the LGBT community.

Speaking on MSNBC, Perkins has falsely claimed that “the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children,” and another FRC official has called for criminalizing homosexuality.

Yet instead of accurately identifying FRC as a untrustworthy hate group, MSNBC has continued to treat its officials as legitimate political commentators, most recently inviting Perkins on air just yesterday twice to discuss how evangelical Christians view the Republican presidential candidates.

In response, Faithful America has launched a petition calling on MSNBC to “stop inviting Family Research Council spokespeople on the air to represent the views of Christians and other people of faith.”

Just as racist rhetoric has no place in the media, anti-gay liars should not be baptized as credible Christian messengers, particularly for a network built on progressive viewers. MSNBC should continue its move to improve its contributor rolls by keeping FRC off its shows.

Why Do News Networks Promote Anti-Gay Hate Groups?

Despite being registered as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a number of news networks - and newspapers like the Washington Post - have continued to regularly provide a platform for FRC spokesmen to disseminate their hate based and fraudulent anti-gay venom. It's not as if legitimate voices of religious people aren't available. The fact that Tony Perkins (who has past ties to white supremacy groups) in particular receives fawning interviews is particularly disgusting. Would these same networks provide similar venues for the Imperial Wizard of the KKK or spokesmen of Neo-Nazi groups that deny the Holocaust and idolize Hitler? I think not. Here are some highlights from Equality Matters:

In November of 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group due to its “propagation of known falsehoods” about the LGBT community. Since being listed, however, FRC spokespersons have been invited 52 times to discuss issues ranging from the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” to the 2012 presidential campaign. Despite FRC’s long history of producing anti-gay propaganda, every major news network has invited the group on national television while failing to acknowledge its hate group designation.

SPLC: FRC’s “Specialty Is Defaming Gays And Lesbians.” From an October 7 SPLC report:

The Family Research Council (FRC) bills itself as “the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,” but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians. The FRC often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws and anti-bullying programs. To make the case that the LGBT community is a threat to American society, the FRC employs a number of “policy experts” whose “research” has allowed the FRC to be extremely active politically in shaping public debate. [...]

The FRC also strongly promotes the “ex-gay” movement as a way to combat LGBT civil rights measures, though professional organizations have repeatedly called so-called “reparative therapy” (which seeks to turn gays and lesbians into heterosexuals) into question and issued statements that don’t support it. [...]

Part of the FRC’s recent strategy is to pound home the false claim that gays and lesbians are more likely to sexually abuse children. This is false.

FRC President Tony Perkins Made 32 Television Appearances Since Being Labeled A Hate Group Leader. According to an Equality Matters analysis*, FRC president Tony Perkins has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News a total of 34 times in twelve months after being his organization was labeled as a hate group.

Are these news networks incredibly lazy, ignorant, bigoted against gays, or what? It drives me crazy that when Perkins and others appear they (1) are NEVER asked hard questions and (2) their nasty past and/or numerous lies are never exposed. Joe Jervis summed it up well in regard to Perkins:

I'd also like to know why every single network ignores the scandal that sank Perkins' political career, namely his exposure as having paid KKK Grand Wizard David Duke a whopping $82,500 for access to his mailing list of racists. There's also this: "On May 17th, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a 'retrograde species of humanity.'"

Exposing the Lie of Gay Promiscuity in Public Parks

One of the favorite lies of the far right and the perpetually lying professional Christian organizations is the ongoing effort to depict LGBT individuals - gay men in particular - as sexually promiscuous and constantly looking for sexual hook ups and trysts in public parks as well as similar public venues. All too frequently the irresponsible and incredibly lazy media reporters and talking head news anchors merely parrot the bullshit being mouthed by the Christianists and never bother to make any effort to fact check the claims to see if the alleged facts support by objective facts. That after all would require some effort and would likely result in less sensational and titillating stories. Matt Comer - another 2008 Blogger Summit participant I had the honor of meeting - decided to check out the sensationalized stories carried by WBTV-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina against the actual police records. Low and behold, it turns out that the WBTB-TV stories were NOT supported by the facts. Oh, and of the men arrested, the majority are married men on the down low. In short, if any problem of promiscuity and prostitution exits in Charlotte, by a vast majority of cases it is HETEROSEXUAL prostitution. NOT GAY SEX. Here are some highlights from Matt's post on QNotes:
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If Charlotte news station WBTV or Republican Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James were your only sources of information, you’d likely be led to believe the Queen City has a significant problem with men engaging in illegal sexual activities in the city’s and county’s public parks.
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Fortunately, real journalism uncovers hard numbers — facts backed up by police records — that show an astonishingly low rate of arrests for men soliciting so-called crimes against nature in public places.

The myth that gay men are predators is nothing new. . . . . Armed with nothing more than anonymous online postings from a hook-up website, [WBTV reporter Steve] Crump took to southwest Charlotte’s James Boyce Park to interview concerned parents and community members.
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Crump’s report included interviews with parents and the leader of a nearby neighborhood patrol, accompanied by several video images of young children playing on swing sets and other playground equipment, on a baseball field and with their parents. Copies of the website postings were shown to parents during interviews. In one scene, the reporter mentions the name of the website, “Cruising Gays,” followed by a parent’s, “Oh no!” Later, a young woman is heard saying, “This is awful.”
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Following their initial report, WBTV aired another story after County Commissioner James publicly questioned how recreation officials were dealing with “sexual predators” and the “moral scourge” in Mecklenburg County parks. James claimed the parks had become home to “homos-xual infestations” and that the police still “arrest about 250 homosexuals a year.”
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Following WBTV’s report, Qnotes decided to do what Crump and his colleagues chose not to. We immediately undertook an investigation of arrests and charges for solicitation of a crime against nature and requested information from CMPD for all of 2010 and 2011 through the end of February. According to CMPD’s Rob Tufano, a total of 325 people were charged in 2010 and 2011 with soliciting a crime against nature. Of the total, only 69 [21%] were men. Forty-seven men were arrested and charged, and the remainder were issued citations. . . . Only 15 cases [out of 325 in total] involved men charged with a non-prostitution-, non-drug-related solicitation of a crime against nature.
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“What we generally, mainly enforce is the [heterosexual] prostitution. We have a proliferation of it on the internet. It used to be Craigslist; now it is Backpage. We also have a decent sized street prostitution problem here in Charlotte and at back massage parlors.” . . . The majority of arrested men, Hollar said, are either married or haven’t publicly acknowledged their sexual orientation.
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The lopsided numbers all point to heterosexual prostitution as the primary issue of concern among sexual crimes in Charlotte — not men who have sex with men. Upon further investigation and upon being exposed to the public, these facts are clear to even the most casual of observers. Yet, reporter Steve Crump and WBTV opted to ignore calls for accuracy, chose to distort and mislead the few facts they cared to report and played into decades-old prejudices and stereotypes of gay men.
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Such behavior is a clear violation of journalistic ethics and can do irreparable harm to LGBT people. That’s why Qnotes, unlike our colleagues at WBTV, opted to engage in real journalism, investigate the issue and report solid facts. We also sought to hold our colleagues at WBTV accountable.
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The evidence points Charlotte — and, in particular, County Commissioner Bill James and WBTV — in one clear direction: stop scapegoating gay men and start looking in the mirror. Misbehaving heterosexuals are your problem. Leave us gay folk alone.
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Kudos to Matt for exposing the lies of WBTV=TV and Commissioner James. Lies are lies whether or not the liar pretends to be a godly Christian like Commissioner James or not. As is so often the case, the real facts are so inconvenient to the Christianist agenda. When need to be constantly vigilant so that lazy journalists do not get away with regurgitating Christianist lies.

Daily Show Teaches What Journalists Should Being Doing But Don't

There has been a great deal of chatter about the ongoing confrontations between Jon Stewart of the "Daily Show" and “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer in which Stewart has basically shredded Cramer and revealed the lack of serious reporting that goes on all too much of the time by those in the mainstream media. Had the media done its job and asked hard questions instead of fawning over members of the Chimperator's regime the whole Iraq War debacle could have been avoided. It is nothing less than an indictment of the main media outlets that Stewart - who is on a comedy channel for God's sakes - does a better job in looking at serious issues. In fact, many young voters I know watch the Daily Show precisely because it does take on the established news media's ass kissing approach to those they should be holding accountable.

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Locally, our news media is beyond pitiful and it is little wonder that both the Virginian Pilot and the Daily Press are in financial trouble and slashing jobs right and left. For years both papers have been operated more as advertising platforms instead of news outlets and now they are baffled as to why subscriptions are falling. The answer is easy: they report little serious news and most coverage of national or world stories are a day or more old. Meanwhile, serious readers have already found that news via other sources, principally online. One of the wonderful thing about the blogosphere is that news junkies can get much faster information than waiting for the print media. In addition, the blogosphere it is beginning to put serious pressure on lazy reporters and journalists to start doing their job. Only with an aggressive and competent news media can bad policies be nipped in the bud. Hiring news anchors because of their pretty faces instead of their minds and competence needs to change. The New York Times took note of the meeting of the adversaries here and ought to take a lesson out of Stewart's play book itself. Andrew Sullivan has a good analysis of why Jon Stewart and those like him are important:

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Stewart - that little comic with the Droopy voice for Lieberman - is actually becoming an accidental activist. Why he matters, is why South Park matters. He, like Matt and Trey, do not leave aside their own profession from scrutiny: they have the actual balls to take it on. There is a cloying familiarity among many cable show hosts and television personalities. We all have to get along, even though some of us may believe that others of us are very much part of the problem, rather than the solution. And what Stewart has done is rip off that little band-aid of faux solidarity for a modicum of ethical and moral accountability.

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It's not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.

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Whether or not the MSM will wake up remains to be seen. It would be wonderful if anchors and talking heads would start asking hard questions and challenging those who pretend to be "experts" but in fact are nothing more than opinionated windbags or religious nutcases.