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During a Tuesday segment about cheating in Atlanta schools, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly declared that "secularism" was at the core of the problem.

"Do you believe that 95 percent of kids cheat?" liberal radio host Alan Colmes asked O'Reilly.

"I would put the number about 85 probably," O'Reilly said. "It's about how you're taught. Look, once the public school system embraced secularism, Moses and his crew with the Ten Commandments were banished."

"We live in a secular society," Colmes pointed out.

"It used to be that Judeo-Christian ethics were taught. It used to be ethics classes. No longer!" O'Reilly exclaimed. "That's what happened."

"So, you agree with me that this is an epidemic?" O'Reilly asked conservative radio host Monica Crowley.

"I think it's getting worse," Crowley remarked. "I think with the proliferation of media, too, you get an echo chamber where kids out there, okay, see people in authority, whether it's the president, whether it's members of Congress, Anthony Weiner or Barack Obama saying I'm going to cut the deficit my first term and blows it out of control. Or if they see O.J Simpson walking away committing a double homicide, getting away with it, Casey Anthony. They are learning the lesson of what they see out there in the culture. They are constantly thinking, 'Hey, I could get away with it too.'"

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I'm so sick and tired of how our media has handled this latest fiasco with their coverage of the Casey Anthony murder trial I'm beyond disgusted. Chris Hayes made some great points during this segment and it reminded me of what Jon Stewart said during his interview with Chris Wallace about what stories our corporate media decides to cover.

We posted a portion of that interview here, but here's the transcript from a bit of the interview that we did not feature at C&L:

STEWART: Because I think their bias is towards sensationalism and laziness. I wouldn't say it's towards a liberal agenda. It's light fluff. So, it's absolutely within the wheelhouse. I mean, if your suggestion is that they are relentlessly partisan and why haven't they gone and backed away from Weiner? Now, they jumped into the Weiner pool -- so, with such delight and such relish, because the bias --

WALLACE: Some things are indefensible.

STEWART: -- the bias of the mainstream media -- oh, I'm not saying it's defensible, but the bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict and laziness.

Chris Hayes took the conversation to a higher level and that is along with the fact that for whatever reason our media decides to glom onto one of these stories, the bigger travesty is what they're ignoring when they do it. Good for Chris Hayes, but imagine a world where our corporate media wasn't having this commentary compete with Joe Scarborough or most of their daytime coverage and hourly hackery on the same network.

It also would have been nice if he'd used the Flores family murder instead as an example of the type of story our media is ignoring while giving wall to wall coverage of the Anthony ambulance chasing and media circus.

I've read a bit on line saying that Hayes has been picked up by MSNBC with a contract for his own show. I'm wondering if that was a preemptive move by MSNBC to make sure Olbermann and Al Gore's Current TV didn't hire him instead.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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