Is Watching secular TV incompatible with being a Christian?
Catholics Unplug your Televisions
CUT
Christians Unplug your Televisions
Most Catholics have watched the TV all their lives, however in the last few years there has been a marked change. The producers of many programmes seem to be pushing the barriers of what’s acceptable to be received into peoples homes. At the same time they attack the Catholic Church for upholding standards that the same producers feel are out of date. We feel that they are attacking the Catholic Church because her teaching is diametrically opposed to what the TV shows us.
Anti-Catholic Bias
We believe in recent years the Church and her teachings have been systematically attacked by broadcasters particularly by the BBC.
We have written letters of complaint but all we got back were vague platitudes and bland denials. They have said they do not recognise what we are talking about, well that quite frankly insults our intelligence. The following are just a few of the broadcast incidents which have upset Catholics in the last two years.
BBC Radio 4 & BBC Radio 5 Live regularly attack the Church’s family-orientated values. Quite often they will only interview Catholic dissidents on certain issues, particularly on issues of sexual morality (which seem to be their main interest). They have even edited the interviews of Church spokesman Clifford Longley to the detriment of their arguments.
BBC 1’s The Virgin Mary: this programme should be a lesson to all Catholics on how they present programmes on matters sacred to our faith. This programme broadcast just before Christmas 2002. There was hardly any meditation of traditional teachings and values for the festive season.
Channel 4’s Good Friday - a programme on Elizabeth I. It was very biased against Catholic Mary. The old myth about Good Queen Bess and Bloody Mary continues.
BBC TV Channel 4’s A profile on Cardinal Ratzinger: this programme is a typical example of BBC’s self-proclaimed but specious assertion to even-handedness. For example the presenter interviewed an Oxford Catholic Theology tutor who said that there is a great revival in the Southern Europe - it’s the North that’s the Sick Man of Europe and that there is no problem in the Third World. The presenter contradicted him completely after the interview. The BBC present their views as facts when there is no one to contradict them. This shallow duplicity is almost standard screenplay for the modern BBC documentary when dealing with the Catholic Church. The programme seemed to be really about Hans Kung and his views about the Church and Cardinal Ratzinger.
BBC TV Channel 4 - The Celibacy Debate, This programme followed hard on the heels of the profile on Cardinal Ratzinger. The panel balance did not seem to be achieved, therefore to call this a debate was ambitious.
BBC Radio 5 Live - 24th August 03: the BBC was subjective with the news. The BBC went to great lengths to report on the death of a Catholic priest in America who was a paedophile whilst totally ignoring the case of the choirmaster at St Paul’s. This item came from the Daily Telegraph.
Many Catholics believe that the following programmes show the true extent of anti-Catholic bias at the BBC. For pure vindictive spite against the Catholic Church it would be hard to top this. Why were these broadcasts made on the eve of the John-Paul II 25th anniversary of becoming Pope? Was it spoiling tactics at a time of joy felt by Catholics at this time?
BBC Panorama’s Sex and the Holy City, in which they actually had the temerity to blame the African AIDS crises on Catholic moral teaching. Perhaps it’s the BBC programmes that seem to encourage sex outside of marriage, that help promote promiscuity. Therefore it’s their programmes which are the real cause of the AIDS crisis.
BBC Kenyon Confronts which raked over old and well-aired allegations of child abuse broadcast on prime time BBC TV on the eve of the Pope's Jubilee celebrations.
Can Condoms Kill? Following the attack on Catholic teaching in the Panorama programme Sex and the Holy City Cardinal Lopez Trujillo wrote ‘Family Values Versus Safe Sex’ in which he championed abstinence before marriage, and fidelity within, as being the only real way to stop the AIDS crisis and not condoms, which have never been proven completely safe. The BBC seemed stung by this reasoned and well-researched report and produced another Panorama programme (27 June 2004) on the subject ‘Can Condoms Kill?’
What of the future? Will the BBC withdraw Popetown, the cartoon that shows the Pope as infantile, and bouncing around the Vatican on a pogo stick? If the BBC does not pull the plug on this, more and more Catholics are going to pull the plug on them. This also means that the BBC must not allow it to be distributed through out the rest of the world as well. They made it with money from the licence fee so they must withdraw it. To sign a petition goto http://www.stop-popetown.org.uk/
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