Friday, December 24, 2010

Networks: Merry Anti-Christmas

The Culture & Media Institute has released a story called "Christmas Without Christ" that chronicles TV networks' aversion to mention of religious aspects of Christmas. Reportedly, "just seven stories out of 527 (1.3 percent) mentioned the deity in two years of network evening news coverage." The easy explanation for this may be that secular Jews are prevalent in TV broadcasting, and the thought that Christmas has religious meaning for Christian gentiles may never occur to them, or they may simply not think of a religious Christmas as being newsworthy for a general audience.

But let's try to figure out what the percentage of stories that mention religious Christmas things should be.

Even among religious types, non-religious aspects of Christmas are important: things like food, decorations, lights, travel, relatives, santa, and most of all for little kids: PRESENTS. Nevertheless, churches across the nation stage yearly nativity plays, and various churches have their respective Christmas traditions such as midnight Mass, carols, advent wreathes, and in more historic times, processions. It is obvious that more than 1.3% of Americans include God as part of their Christmas traditions.

If only 1.3% of stories even mention God, many of these may be brief references, so the actual amount of time spent on God or religious Christmas elements may be even more minuscule. Regardless, it seems the networks are not concerned with drawing religious Christians to their viewership.

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