It's an example of selection bias - ie counting the hits and ignoring the misses.

"When things go right you praise the almighty

and give thanks in Jesus's name

But when things go wrong you change your song

and God never gets the blame."

- From Dan Barker's song "Nothing Fails Like Prayer."

What it matters to me is you acting like a 15 yo shithead to Renee for no reason.  Maybe you need to grow up too, eh?

No, you never said it.  But you sure as hell acted like it.

I like you just fine when you aren't being an ass to a regular member of this forum with little to no provocation.

There's a broader issue here, and quite a serious one.

The USA, despite all appearances to the contrary portrayed especially through the mass media, is a secular nation, and that secularity is established in its constitution. The First Amendment (ironically, given the fact that it is precisely this amendment that is cited by certain journalists in defending their "right" to pepper their reportage with blatantly biased and/or religious terminology and slants) was in fact meant to be a tool to ensure that such a situation never arose, in that it guaranteed freedom of expression to all views subject to the limitations also described in the constitution (incitement to violence, for example, is not considered a legally valid construct of "view statement", no matter how justified the person feels they are in making it).

Broadcasting companies and newspapers in the USA, when applying for a licence to publish material, do so under the terms set out by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), who are not only the licencing authority for broadcasters but effectively their watchdog. In the case of newspapers the FCC's role is extremely limited since its involvement is restricted to the newspapers use of "wire" communications, a term that made complete sense in 1934 when the FCC was founded but which has become increasingly more ambiguous and contentious in today's technological reality. But when it comes to TV and Radio, they are the licence dispensers and their word holds.

However, the FCC takes the First Amendment very seriously indeed and uses it as justification not to prosecute any broadcaster who uses the freedom of speech guaranteed by that amendment's clause to air biased reportage. This effectively means that the US broadcasters, unlike those in the UK for example, have a huge latitude allowed to them in how they wish to present themselves. They can therefore be as overtly christian as they wish, and as consistently overtly christian as they wish, without fear of prosecution.

But - and it's a significant but - broadcasters, when applying to the FCC for a licence or licence renewal must define their function, and the licence they receive reflects that function. A christian radio station, for example, is straying outside its licence terms if it suddenly converts to islam and starts calling the faithful to prayer six times a day, filling the intervening hours with "thought for the day" from the station's team of mullahs. Likewise, a national news network is moving close to breaching its terms should it direct its broadcasts to a particular section of society. This latter deviation is harder to detect and prosecute however, which is why the FCC shies away from it, but it does register cumulative reported breaches and responds with a system of scaled "warnings" to the station that it is not doing its proclaimed job.

Stations, for their part, tend to see the FCC and the warnings that can emanate from it, in purely financial terms. They weigh the profitability of broadcasting to a particular sector against the veiled threats of licence invocation from the FCC should that policy begin to produce objections. Fox News, like any of the other big players, has staked its pitch and has decided to provide a service to a sector which it considers profitable (Murdoch's true - and only - motivation in anything). It does however, like the others, wish to avoid being publicly denounced by its own licencing authority, at least wth any great frequency, since this introduces an unknown and potentially negative factor affecting its future profitability.

Hence the "lost little child" story being peppered with christian innuendo, and hence also the obvious editorial instruction to scale that innuendo down. This is Fox's particular tightrope stunt and it's one it does with obviously cynical frequency - push the message to "our" audience in the way they like, but back off before it might generate objections being inputted into the FCC complaints database. One only has to watch Bill O'Reilly and his editorial staff in operation to see the process running in realtime.

If, as a consumer, you object to this stunt, then you really only have one avenue to pursue to make your objection real. For example, if you object to a national news station pushing a particular agenda subliminally (and the original post on this thread described exactly that) then you are entitled and obliged as a citizen who values true freedom of expression to use this form

https://esupport.fcc.gov/sform2000/formE!input.action?form_page=2000E

to register your comlaint with the FCC. If they get enough complaints concerning a particular station, and especially a particular policy pursued by a station whose licence includes an obligation to report unbiased news to the nation, then they in turn are obliged to begin their series of escalation warnings. It will never put Fox News off the air, but it will have a huge influence on their accountants, and when it comes to any station or media enterprise owned by Murdoch, this is the soft underbelly of the beast.

Sites like this should be an ideal place for like-minded people to coordinate such a strategy, so to kick things off I have had a look at the reportage referred to by the original poster, concurred with her analysis (if not her desire to see the child come to harm just to show the journalists up), and sent in my complaint as an overseas consumer. Now, let's see a few US objectors do likewise.

Showing nipple or behaving in any way contrary to your stated remit when you apply for a licence may invoke an FCC fine, but that is not why the FCC fines in those circumstances. Showing nipple before the agreed benchmark or on a programme aimed to an audience that includes children is actually illegal. And when it come to Stern it wasn't him, as you say, but his employers who were fined for similar transgressions. By the way, a lot of those fines were successfully appealed.

Neither of these issues has anything much to do with free speech anyway, as I said above. Free speech as a right does not include breaking the law. Jackson's tit might not have been her broadcasters' decision to expose, but that argument didn't help Stern's employers either. The law is the law.

On a more pertinent note Matt, the other point you are apparently missing in attempting to "correct" me is that the FCC acts against broadcast material which is technically legal but which infringes the applicants' licence terms. That is the core of my, and the original poster's, objection to the Fox News coverage in question. It is just that it does so through a different method than direct prosecution and only on the basis of having been alerted in the first place. Instead of getting on my case get on Fox's and use the avenue open to you to make a difference. Otherwise keep your "corrections" to yourself. They make you sound like a person who just wants to whinge but not one who will explore the existing avenues to achieve what you say you want. As long as you and other apathetics don't do so you really have no right (except under the First Amendment) to use your speech to dissuade others from doing so.

Up off you arse, in other words, and at least complain after you have failed - not before you have even tried.

I wouldn't say it was unprovoked.  She made a dumb comment, I called her out. 

Perhaps I do need to grow up, but just keep in mind that I'm not the one wishing bad fortune on children. 

You say that as though I'm not a regular member.  I've actually been registered here longer than Renee and I have more posts that she does.  Am I not a regular member because I believe in God? 

Knowledge = Understanding of the world.

These two concepts are what we intelligent people call 'interchangable'. That means that one can be interchanged with the other, and they mean the same thing.

And again, you're wrong. The Bible is a product of the fields you mention, not the parent. Now, a few hundred years ago, during the dark ages, you'd be correct; but modern Western society is secular. It was not built atop the Bible.

Did she? Let's take a look:

See the part that I underlined? This brings out what us smart people call 'the subtext' of what Renee meant here. She didn't wish the news was bad because she wanted people to get hurt; she wanted people to get a wake-up call from their state of intellectual slumber, and knew that a negative outcome would've brought one.

Turns out that you your thinking with your balls and not your brain, likely because said balls have been at the beck and call of your God for some time now.

No she didn't.  She made a truthful statement about what she felt.  You called her insulting names for it.

She didn't wish bad fortune on any child.  She was wishing that adults would grow up and quit believing in a mythical father figure in the sky to take care of their responsibilities for them.

If you want to invent things in your head about what I said feel free.  I could care less about who was registered before who.

Let me teach you a couple lessons about posting on the internets, jmm.

1) Your name:  You don't have one.  You have initials.

2) Visual representation:  You don't have one.  With avatars it makes it very easy for someone to associate you with a picture.  Sometimes on certain forums, if they change their forum avatar it really fucks me up and I have to stop and think about their name to remember who they are so I can remember their personality.  With you I just have J M M to consider and a theist tag.  So I consider you a faceless, no named automation of a theist.  Not a lot for me to associate any kind of feelings toward you one way or the other.  I mostly consider you a stranger compared even to most people that have been posting on here for only a month or two.

3) Other types of communication:  These forums are only one of the places that RRS folks hang out.  There are two other places that we hang out as well and communicate with each other all the time.  I talk with Renee on almost a daily basis away from these forums along with a lot of other people from here.  You've been here far longer than needed to find them, so I figure you're just here to...well I don't know why you're here.  Why do you come here all the time to hang out with us atheists, jmm?