A leading investigative reporter skewers the quasi-official National Prayer Breakfast on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Sunday “Freethought Matters” TV show.
Jonathan Larsen is not only an investigative reporter and managing editor with the news platform TYT, he’s also been involved in some of the most popular TV news programs. He’s written for “Good Morning America,” worked on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” was the executive producer of “Up with Chris Hayes” and helped launch CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,”as well as Air America Radio and some of its programs, including “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Larsen talks on “Freethought Matters” about his superlative investigative reporting for TYT on the annual National Prayer Breakfast, which occurs every year on the first Thursday in February and has the appearance of a government-sponsored event. The program, which includes historic and current photos and footage of the prayer breakfasts, definitively documents how this event has created an unseemly mix of religion and politics.
“What the breakfast represents is sort of a nexus between the worlds of Christian financial power and Christian political power and that nexus especially coming into a space that’s not mediated by any kind of democratic structures,” Larsen explains to “Freethought Matters” co-hosts Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor. “There’s no vetting. There’s no accountability. There’s no transparency. There’s literally no way for the people to see who of my representatives are involved in this: What are they doing? Who are they meeting with and what’s coming out of these events?”
If you don’t live in the quarter-plus viewership of the nation where the show broadcasts on Sunday, you can already catch the interview on FFRF’s YouTube channel. New shows go up every Thursday.
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Upcoming guests include an interview with journalist Elle Hardy on the alarming rise of Pentecostalism worldwide. You can catch interviews from past seasons here, including the fall 2022 season with author John Irving, actor John “Q” de Lancie and Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen. Previous interviews include Julia Sweeney and Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, Hank Johnson and Eleanor Holmes Norton, among many other notable authors, activists and freethinkers.
Please tune in to “Freethought Matters” . . . because freethought matters.
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