Study: TV programs down on religion

Television entertainment programs mention God more often than they did in the mid-1990s but tend to depict organized religion negatively, according to a new study.

The Parents Television Council watched every hour of prime time on the broadcast networks during the 2003-04 season and logged 2,344 mentions of religion. It judged 22 percent of the mentions positive, 24 percent negative and the rest neutral.

“Ninety percent of the American people believes in God,” said Brent Bozell, the council’s president. “Hollywood is attacking the very thing that they consider important in their own lives. Perhaps Hollywood ought to be changing its world view.”

Negative examples varied widely, from comic Jimmy Kimmel joking on the American Music Awards that winners should resist thanking God, to a Catholic priest admitting on “The Practice” that he had had sex with a woman who was later murdered.

Well-publicized scandals about pedophile priests made Catholics particularly vulnerable, the council found.

“Catholicism is in the bull’s-eye of the entertainment medium,” Bozell said.

His group singled out NBC, saying its mentions of religion were nearly 10 time more likely to be negative than positive. “Law & Order” episodes, which tend to have stories ripped from the headlines, helped skew those numbers. Replied an NBC spokeswoman: “It is never our intention to appear, nor do we accept the notion that we are, anti-religious.”

Among the positive examples, the PTC cites a “JAG” episode where a character prays to God to say hello to her dead mother, and an “American Dreams” episode where an actor playing a medical student says a surgery is partially in God’s hands.