Texas This I Know...

Texas This I Know...
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Saturday, September 17, 2005

NBC Woos Christians, NYT Looks Down Nose, Sniffs

It seems NBC has decided to try something different with a show aimed at a Christian audience. NBC is reallly desperate for ratings and they will do anything, even cater to, ugh!, Christians.

Newsmax has a take on a New York Times review of "Three Wishes"

Saturday, Sept. 17,
NBC to Air Christian Show

An upcoming TV series featuring Christian pop singer Amy Grant will make its debut next Friday, and NBC is pulling out all the stops to promote it.

In "Three Wishes," Amy Grant will visit a different town every week, where, in a gesture of Christian charity, she will seek to fulfill the wishes of needy families and community groups, according to the New York Times.

The show, which Amy Grant describes as "faith in action," is being heavily promoted by NBC, which, the Times reports, has sent more than 7,000 DVDs of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Amy Grant.

NBC also has scheduled Grant, who recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages," for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.

The Times, widely noted for its dismissive attitude toward anything that smacks of Christianity, was unable to resist commenting that the network's promotion of the series is "evocative of a red-state presidential campaign," which "bears scant resemblance to any NBC has crafted before."

To the Times, "red state" means an area of lowbrow superstition offensive to the elite circles in which the newspaper travels.

"Three Wishes," Times reporter Jacques Steinberg noted, "is aimed, in no small part, at a churchgoing rural and suburban audience" – you know, the sort of intellectually backward types who inhabit red states.

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