Fox’s Your World with Neil Cavuto invited on MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham on Thursday to discuss the network near-blackout on the massive group of Catholic lawsuits against the Obama administration over their narrow definition of what a “religious institution” is. Substitute host Eric Bolling showed CBS leading off with Catholic sex abuse charges again, and asked if there were lighter stories on the evening news that deserved less attention than this litigation.
“Last night, the other two networks led with the Facebook IPO that’s collapsing,” Graham said. “But they had time for – ABC had three minutes on how you swim out of a rip current. They also had time on NBC to talk about how Prince Charles is trying his hand at being a DJ. So it’s not like they don’t have the time in these newscasts to devote two minutes to a lawsuit of this magnitude.” [Video and transcript below]
Audio difficulties between FNC and the MRC studio made the usual TV interview impossible, which led to a phone interview instead. This is how it continued:
BOLLING: Is it a colluded effort? Is it all three saying ‘we’re not going with this, so don’t you go with it’? And then they make the decision collectively not to go with that story? How does that work?
GRAHAM: Well, the old story is they don’t need to have a conspiracy, just a consensus. This is a group of people who all want Obama to be reelected, and they’re going to simply say ‘Look, this whole Catholic lawsuit just seems like a Republican publicity stunt to us, and we’re not gonna touch it.’ And look, this is – these are people who represent 60 million American Catholics. That’s a substantial voting bloc. They deserve more respect than the complete diss these networks have given the American Catholic church.
BOLLING: Just a wink and nod, we’re not going to go there because it looks a little bit too pro-GOP?
GRAHAM: Well that’s – anything that looks a little too pro-GOP gets left on the cutting room floor. That’s just the way this goes. So we’re just going to keep at this, and not only did we have some Catholic leaders come out for this, today we, the MRC’s also come out with evangelical leaders who agree that this issue should be covered. Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and others are saying this is an issue that the American people to deserve to learn about from the people who call themselves the “objective, mainstream media.”
