BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

First off, this is one of those infuriatingly ex-cathedra and not well-founded articles that John Allen is occasionally capable of.

I beg to disagree most strongly with his main thesis in this column. If only because the Pope, any Pope - especially in the age of the Internet - can never be just an Italian story.

One swallow does not a summer make - and while there may be some truth to the relative lack of interest by most especially the Anglophone press in covering Benedict XVI, so far it really applies only to the so-called mainstream media. Which as some American commentators have pointed out is increasingly fringe rather than mainstream - the once 'great' names of journalism whose newspaper readership and TV audience has been steadily dwindling because Americans are seeing through their shameless liberal bias.

Mr. Allen may entertain the conceit that he was virtually the only Anglophone correspondent covering the trip, but AP, Reuters and AFP did file all the reports and newsphotos that they should have filed, and upon which the rest of the world generally relies for reportage since very few can afford to assign dedicated Vatican correspondents! And as conscientious a reporter as Allen generally is, the readership of his magazine is nonetheless insignificant compared to the worldwide syndication of the news agencies.

The news service coverage of the Czech trip was par for the course - neither any worse or less objective or less comprehensive than the tendentious reports filed by the New York Times, for example - which, by the way did have a correspondent reporting directly from the Czech Republic.



The Pope has become
an Italian story

Oct. 2, 2009


Rome -- At one point during Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the Czech Republic last weekend, I strolled across the press center in the Prague Hilton. Taking in the conversations floating through the air, and gazing at the people in the room, I was struck by this insight: The Pope has once again become largely an Italian story. [Again, I must remark: A false insight!]

Pope John Paul II was a global newsmaker, and the press corps that followed him was strikingly international. These days, the non-Italians who regularly travel with the Pope have dwindled to the media equivalent of a remnant church.

[Has Allen not thought that this happenstance coincided with the start of the worldwide financial crisis? He himself wrote a long column last March about how media outfits could not afford to send a correspondent travelling wit the Pope to Cameroon and Angola because of the cost of the roundtrip tickets. In any case, travelling with the Pope does not necessarily guarantee better or more comprehensive reportage!]

On this trip, there was no one from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or CNN (unless you count me, but my phone never rang), all of whom used to be regulars. [From what I recall of media names in the published passenger manifestos of those travelling with Pope Benedict, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times never did, to begin with. As for CNN, it has long been decisively dislodged from cable news dominance by Fox.]

Fox was on the papal plane, but only because their Rome correspondent is invested in the Vatican story; if he weren't around, it's a good bet Fox wouldn't be in the mix either. [Come again???]

To be sure, those agencies have a presence in Prague, so it's not like they blew off the story. But once upon a time, all would have had a correspondent moving with the papal party and filing daily coverage. At that level, the American presence boiled down to the Associated Press, a producer from ABC, and the Catholic News Service. (I made the trip, but not on the plane.)

Probably the lone thing that people who get their news from American TV know about the trip is that at one point a spider crawled across the pope's garments. That clip has become popular on You-Tube, and of course it doesn't require any reporting or analysis to understand.
[If they watch Fox like I do, they will know that Fox reported the Pope's trip regularly on their regular news breaks, even carrying some moments live - parts of the Masses and his arrival and departure speeches. And the daily Yahoo summary of newspapers using the wire service stories was not less than on other trips - if you don't count extraneous reporting like AIDS and condoms, or sex offender priests, in previous trips.]

Two points probably help explain this lack of global interest.

First, Benedict XVI simply isn't the charismatic figure John Paul II was. [HO-HUM AND HO-HUM AGAIN!!!]

Second, Benedict has surrounded himself with Italians who sometimes seem more interested in il bel paese than the global scene. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State, regularly injects himself into Italian affairs.

The best sound-bites [???? - Only because controversial and instantly instrumentalized to be used against the Church] from the Holy See usually come, in Italian, from prelates such as Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples.

[Excuse me, Mr. Allen - are you REALLY saying that statements by Benedict XVI reported in the media are second-best to the egoistic pronouncements of some Curial prelates???? It infuriates me that sometimes Allen can be so cocksure of his 'insights' that he plunges headlong into them even when it is clear he has not really thought through his statements and their implications!!!]

In many ways, this is more a return to historical form than a novelty. Prior to John Paul II, most Popes were figures of occasional interest around the world; only in Italy were they everyday headliners.

[Can anyone really say that of any Pope from Pius XII onwards? If the interest was 'occasional', it was also exceptional! John XXIII, who called Vatican II?? Paul VI, who executed Vatican II, became the first modern pilgrim Pope, and shook the modern world with Humanae Vitae?]

No Pope is an everyday headliner anywhere, not even in Italy - and not even John Paul II, who made news when he travelled, and for dramatic and unprecedented events like a near-successful assassination attempt and all the mea culpas on behalf of the Church, but hardly ever for his daily Magisterium, it pains one to say].

Rather than being an exception, Benedict XVI is more like the norm -- and hence a reminder of just how remarkable John Paul actually was. {Being that Benedict XVI is not remarkable at all, in more ways than one, including the fact that he attracts more crowds than his late great predecessor??? It takes quite a lot of chutzpah to imply in any way that Benedict XVI has not been a remarkably remarkable Pope, and I resent it deeply on behalf of all those who love and admire him! Why is Allen descending once again to the invidious comparison game? The Catholic Church is great enough to have great Popes in succession. Greatness is no one's monopoly.]

Nonetheless, this reversion to the papacy as essentially an Italian news beat carries two dangers. [Again, I must insist - IMHO, that's a decidedly fallacious conclusion.]

First, it tempts Italians to interpret almost everything the Pope says or does as a veiled commentary on Italian affairs. A comic moment in the Czech Republic came near the end, when Benedict XVI made a generic reference to the need for public officials to respect moral values.

That triggered a debate among Italian correspondents about whether this was a criticism of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who celebrated his 73rd birthday this week. Berlusconi's alleged escapades with young courtesans fueled a juicy bit of summer theater here.

[And as the rest of the world generally does not get to learn what Italian media report and how they report it, what does that have to do with anything outside Italy???]

The second risk, more relevant for people outside Italy, is that international understanding of the papacy is ever more dependent upon Italian coverage. As I've said before, depending upon the Italians is a dangerous proposition.

[Why? How? And who depends exclusively on the Italians, anyway? Anglophone media, for instance, hardly ever report what the Italian media say about the Pope and the Vatican unless the story involves a scandal or one of the social-issue buzzwords that media feed upon!

Fortunately, no one ever has to depend these days on what the media report or choose to report, because the original sources are now available in real time on the Internet. I don't have to read John Allen to tell me what the Pope said. I can read it directly, or listen to it or watch it even!]

To be sure, Italian journalism has its strengths. It's more art than craft, so correspondents are encouraged to bring their personalities into the coverage. That often makes their essays provocative and highly original.

A concern for factual accuracy, however, does not figure prominently among its virtues. [WHAT A HOOT! As if a concern for factual accuracy figures among the virtues of journalism outside Italy!!!! Allen himself, as I have had occasion to point out whenever he does it, has reported wrong data, including readily verifiable ones, like dates and timelines.] Sometimes speculation or hypotheses run on the news pages, without much indication that they're not to be taken seriously.

Of course, Italians know all that, and they're highly sophisticated about reading between the lines. When this speculation is translated into other languages and taken as real news, however, it can cause a great deal of mischief -- especially, perhaps, in Anglo-Saxon cultures, where we're still at least somewhat inclined to assume that what appears on the news pages is factually true.

[Where do you live, John Allen? Italians are no more sophisticated about the media than the regular man on the street anywhere in the world. Americans perhaps are beginning to wake up about the whole house of cards that printed media is, but most of the time, people still tend to believe that anything printed confers some legitimacy on whatever is reported.]

If the Italian near-monopoly on Vatican coverage [in your mind!] gains strength, therefore, more and more the rule for understanding news about the Pope will have to be caveat lector: "Let the reader beware."

[And that caveat holds for anything anyone ever reads or hears in the media, John Allen included.]