The refusal by ABC and NBC to run a national ad critical of President Obama's health care reform plan is raising questions from the group behind the spot -- particularly in light of ABC's health care special aired in prime time last June and hosted at the White House.

The 33-second ad by the League of American Voters, which features a neurosurgeon who warns that a government-run health care system will lead to the rationing of procedures and medicine, began airing two weeks ago on local affiliates of ABC, NBC, FOX and CBS. On a national level, however, ABC and NBC have refused to run the spot in its present form.

"It's a powerful ad," said Bob Adams, executive director of the League of American Voters, a national nonprofit group with 15,000 members who advocate individual liberty and government accountability...

A well-known entertainment critic says vigilance from Christians has resulted in more family-friendly movies coming out of Hollywood.

Ted Baehr is founder of MovieGuide and chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission. For more than 20 years, he has reviewed theatrical releases from a Christian perspective. He says while Hollywood still produces movies that are unsuitable for Christians, moviemakers are discovering a large market for films with a biblical message or theme...

House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) says he’s troubled by a California Democrat’s plan to push for the return – and expansion – of the Fairness Doctrine.
 
In a newspaper interview on Monday, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said she would work on bringing back the federal regulation that requires equal time for the expression of different political views on the public airwaves...

A television special addressing attacks on Christianity and Christmas will air this weekend.

Coral Ridge Ministries is producing the program titled Is Jesus God? In the past few years, several media outlets have featured specials that question the authority of God's Holy Word, which is what prompted Coral Ridge Ministries to produce the show...

A British television channel plans to show a film about an American man who commits assisted suicide at a Swiss clinic, reigniting debate over an issue that strongly divides opinion in Britain. Opponents called the broadcast a ratings-grabbing stunt.

Feelings about the issue ran so high Wednesday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked about the program in Parliament...

While U.S. combat casualties in Iraq were at an all-time low in November 2008 – five reported combat deaths -- coverage of the war was sparse in The New York Times and The Washington Post compared with previous election cycles, an analysis of the Nexis news database shows.
 
In The New York Times, four front-page stories mentioned Iraq in the headline in November 2008 compared with 13 in November 2006, the last time a national election was held -- a drop of 70 percent. Most of those front-page stories in The New York Times concerned a security pact between U.S. and Iraqi officials...

Fox News announced that after 12 years, Alan Colmes will be leaving the top-rated "Hannity & Colmes" at the end of the year.

“I approached Bill Shine (FNC’s Senior Vice President of Programming) earlier this year about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network," Colmes said in a statement...

A media analyst says MSNBC host Chris Matthews effectively admitted yesterday he was an unpaid member of Barack Obama's press office.

Matthews appeared Thursday on MSNBC's Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and was asked for his opinion about Congressman Rahm Emanuel's initial public reluctance to accept the position as chief of staff for President-elect Obama. Emanuel has since accepted the post.

During the MSNBC interview, a suggestion was made that there might be turmoil within the new Obama administration, but Matthews refused to get drawn into the conversation, instead saying that as a reporter he was unwilling to "question motives"...

A divided Supreme Court spent an hour on Tuesday talking about dirty words on television without once using any.

There was no apparent consensus on the court about what to do in the dispute between the broadcast networks and the Federal Communications Commission over celebrities' one-time uses of profanity on live television during hours when children are likely to be watching.

Groundbreaking research suggests that pregnancy rates are much higher among teens who watch a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior than among those who have tamer viewing tastes.

"Sex and the City," anyone? That was one of the shows used in the research.
The new study is the first to link those viewing habits with teen pregnancy, said lead author Anita Chandra, a Rand Corp. behavioral scientist. Teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.

Previous research by some of the same scientists had already found that watching lots of sex on TV can influence teens to have sex at earlier ages...