During “America Live” this afternoon, Fox News revisited a controversial interview the network’s religion correspondent, Lauren Green, did over the weekend with author and religious scholar Reza Aslan.
The original interview with Aslan, which was part of a FoxNews.com webcast, generated controversy after BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski wondered if it was “the most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done.” In the nearly 10-minute interview, Green repeatedly asked Aslan, who is Muslim, why he would write a book about about the founder of Christianity.
Shannon Bream revisited the topic on “America Live” this afternoon in an interview with conservative writer and founder of the Media Research Center Brent Bozell. (The network’s own media critic, Howie Kurtz, has yet to publicly weigh in on Green’s interview.)
Bozell defended Green’s line of questioning and said she has been the target of unfair criticism because “the media can’t stand you folks at Fox.” He went on to dispute several findings in Aslan’s book, calling it “biased” and “one-sided.”
“I’ve never in my life heard an author say that 1,000 books were his reference to doing a book. And while we’re at it, he also said more than once that he had a history degree in religion,” Bozell said. “In fact, he doesn’t. So there are all sorts of holes you can poke in this man’s very very biased and very very one-sided book.”
Aslan — whose book has skyrocketed to the top of the Amazon bestseller list since his Fox News appearance, as our sister site GalleyCat notes — has degrees in Religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, according to his online bio.