Welcome to this week’s Weekend Edition Show. Penna Dexter is your host today and her co-host is Dr. Merrill Matthews . Together they will look at the top stories in the news this week and give you a biblical perspective. They are joined briefly by Tim Graham, Media Research Council’s Director of Media Analysis. He discusses the mainstream media’s reaction following President Obama’s announcement of Merrick Garland as his Supreme Court nominee. Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director at Judicial Crisis Network tells us more about the Merrick Garland nomination and the nomination process.
Dr. Matthews is a past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists. Dr. Matthews also served for 10 years as the medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation, and has contributed chapters to several books, including Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate and The 21st Century Health Care Leader and, in 2009, Stop Paying the Crooks (on Medicare fraud).
He has been published in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Barron’s, USA Today, Forbes magazine and the Washington Times. He was an award-winning political analyst for the USA Radio Network.
Dr. Matthews received his Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas
In 2001 and 2002, Graham served as White House Correspondent for World, a national weekly Christian news magazine. He wrote cover stories on taxes, abortion, cloning, and other issues, asked questions at briefings with Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, and interviewed members of Congress and administration officials like then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.
Graham is the author of the book Pattern of Deception: The Media's Role in the Clinton Presidency (Media Research Center, 1996), which critiques the media's coverage of Bill Clinton from 1991 through 1995. From 1989 to 1999, he was associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly and then bi-weekly newsletter of the MRC News Division, where he was responsible for the Study and Janet Cooke Award articles.
She was previously a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, cum laude, of Duke University, and holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics from Michigan State University.