Ben and Rich come back from their holiday vacations and dive right in, discussing their Christmas and New Year celebrations, whether or not sports is truly beneficial, and the recent uproar over Brit Hume’s frank advice to Tiger Woods.
Every week, Richard Clark and Ben Bartlett acknowledge and respond to the big issues in popular culture. We love feedback! If you’d like to respond you can comment on the website, send an email to christandpopculture@gmail.com, or go to our contact page. We would love to respond to feedback on the show, so do it now! Subscribe to us in iTunes by clicking here. While you’re at it, review us in iTunes! We’ll love you forever!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Pop Culture is everywhere. We just acknowledge it. Christ and Pop Culture is an attempt to discuss and think rightly about the common knowledge of our age. 
33 mintues and 40 seconds in is just completely awesome and nonsensical. I absolutely thought you were just being totally rude to Ben. Roffle.
To second the Dane, that part was a chuckler.
I don’t know that news organization’s can be unbiased at all. All facts are interpreted and given slants no matter how hard you try, from work choice to picks of pictures or clips in the broadcast. Best to recognize that a place has a liberal/conservative bias and take it into account.
Rich and Ben, I’d be interested to have your thoughts on MSNBC, since it is now surpassed CNN in viewers, making only Fox its ratings superior (though by a ridiculous margin). How much do you trust it? Do you think it adds to public discussion in a better way than Fox News?
Also, NPR being held up as even approaching unbiased or not pushing a political agenda in nearly all it does is a pretty incredible claim. It does its thing much more thoughtfully than many other liberal outlets but is firmly and constantly pushing a politically left agenda to some degree or other.
Wow… I have to say I’m not sure how that happen. But yeah, it is pretty hilarious.
I totally agree with you, Adam.
There is definitely a lot of unwholesome practices happening in college football.
Take Alabama, who just won a national title (very sorry if anyone is an Alabama fan). Almost every year since Nick Saban has been coach, Alabama offers more scholarships than is allowed. A school is only allowed to have 85 players on scholarship for football. Nick Saban will regularly accept more commitments from players to come to Alabama even when there are no more spots available. How does he get away with this?
Alabama gives out a ridiculous number of medical scholarships for players who supposedly can’t ever play again, and also kicks a lot of players off the team for minor issues. This means that they are able to cycle more players through the system. More players through the system means that they can keep the good ones and cycle out the ones who don’t play as well.
Last year, I read a blog post that found that in the previous 4 years, Alabama has signed 22 more players than Michigan(it was a michigan blog so that is why that is the comparison. Alabama was probably a similar number more than your favorite college team as well, assuming your team doesn’t do the same thing) That is almost one entire recruiting class more.
This means that Alabama signs more players that they are allowed to have and count on the fact that someone is just going to have to get out. This is a severe moral hazard since they have strong motivation to push out players who deserve a spot on the team.
/rant over