HARLINGEN, Texas A public television station owned by the Roman Catholic Diocese in Brownsville, Texas failed to run a "Frontline" program about the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. The station instead repeated the previous week’s program.
Phil Zimmerman, a promotions assistant for "Frontline," says K-M-B-H T-V was one of only two P-B-S affiliates in the nation not to run "Hand of God." He says the other station didn’t air the program because of a scheduling conflict.
Gerald Brazier, a member of a local church reform group, says viewers who called K-M-B-H were told the station’s general manager wanted to preview "Hand of God" to see if it was appropriate for local viewers.
A spokeswoman for the Diocese of Brownsville says the Catholic church owns the station but does not influence programming decisions.
I do wonder how the heck the diocese ended up owning a public television station in the first place.
David Alexander wrote a critique of the documentary last week that invoked a spirited combox thread that included the documentaries director.
7 comments
Here in Seattle, one of the AM radio stations that has a couple of liberal anti-religious talk-show hosts, was just acquired by a company that is owned by the Mormon church. In fact, I heard Jimmy Akin scolding one of those hosts when he bad-mouthed Jimmy during an interview about Catholic Answers’ Voters Guide.
I do wonder how the heck the diocese ended up owning a public television station in the first place.
Me too. I’d suggest they unload it lest they give the Enemy more ammo. (That seems like a confusing sentence. :))
Not only does the Mormon church own many commercial TV and radio stations (including the Salt Lake NBC affiliate) through its wholey owned subsidiary company Bonneville Communications, but through Brigham Young University they own KBYU, a PBS affiliate that shows a lot of Mormon religious programing.
I see no harm in a Catholic Diocese owning a TV station. All stations reserve the right to put whatever they want on TV. Mother Angelica owned EWTN for many years before she gave control solely to the laity. Though that was more because Mahony and others tried to take control of the network from her; she’d still be running the empire if it wasn’t for them.
I am all for dioceses making money. With those dioceses currently in bankruptcy, they’d kill for a large profit gaining venture. With better funded dioceses the church could fund a lawsuit against the Democratic Party under the Civil Rights Act aka Klu Klux Klan act for voting to expand federal funding for Embro Stem Cell Research which clearly violates the rights of the children to live. If my understanding of the Act is right, you can sue public officals for violating the rights of their citizens. Hit the Democrats in the pockets and that kind of Stem Cell research will be a thing of the past.
If my understanding of the Act is right, you can sue public officals for violating the rights of their citizens. Hit the Democrats in the pockets and that kind of Stem Cell research will be a thing of the past.
That would surely work because the courts have such a long history of favoring the rights of pre-born humans. Yeah, right.
Dollars to donuts if the bishops launched such a lawsuit, they’d accomplish nothing more than creating a public relations disaster of an unimaginable magnitude and handing a huge sum of money over to their own lawyers and the DNC to pay for their legal bills. And that’s even assuming the USCCB would be the least bit inclined to sue the Democrats, which is about as likely as finding live Dodo birds at the Zoo.
This sounds like a contradiction to Aristotle’s most basic premise of all argumentation on contradiction: a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. How can a Catholic diocese own a TV station and have no control over what it publishes to the viewers in programming. “Ridiculum ad absurdum!!!”
We need a return to orthodox Roman Catholicism and the good ‘ol days’ when orthodoxy and the episcopate reigned supreme.
http://www.theorthodoxromancatholic.com
I’d be glad if the Catholic Church owned a few MORE pieces of the media. But what spiritual good would it do to own a station and NOT take advantage of influencing what is aired? It’s better to not own it than to take no responsibility for what it expresses, isn’t it?