If anyone out there still doubts the extent and virulence of liberal MSM's anti-Catholic hostility, this article analyzing just one sliver of that picture should be documentation enough. And concerns a topic about which the leading MSM huffed and puffed mightily to discredit Benedict XVI in the worst way possible even if they had to stretch thin facts or even lie outright to come up with their 'stories'. The Media Research Council is a conservative organization that runs the NewsBusters online journal analyzing the faults and failings of the media in general, particularly the liberal media in the United States. However, one obvious deficiency of this analysis is that the writer seems to be a secular voice himself, who is unable to provide any of the qualifying and relevant details that a Catholic writer might add and underscore, and in missing out on such details, the analysis thereby loses a significant part of the necessary context for appreciating the utter shamelessness of MSM anti-Catholic bias.
How the New York Times amped up reporting
on sexual abuse by priests and sought to
directly skewer Benedict XVI on the issue -
and ignores the past of its incoming CEO from BBC
By Matthew Philbin
November 12, 2012
It’s a horrifying and tragically familiar story: A beloved and trusted institution is rocked by allegations of sexual abuse of minors over many years. Intrepid reporters dig to learn how the crimes could have gone on so for so long, who knew about them, and if officials kept it quiet. Story after newspaper story leads with speculation that corruption may be systemic and the cover-up may go all the way to the man at the top.
At least, that’s how the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals played out in the pages of
The New York Times since 2001. Oddly, though, it’s not how the paper has been reporting a similar scandal involving Mark Thompson, the Times’s incoming CEO.
Thompson helmed the BBC in 2011 while the decision was made to abandon a story investigating accusations of pedophilia against long-time network star Jimmy Savile. Thompson takes over at the
Times on Monday, Nov. 12.
Savile was an eccentric fixture at the BBC for decades, hosting programs that included kids’ shows. Since his death in October 2011, Savile has been accused of hundreds of incidents of sexual abuse of underage girls. Many allege the abuse occurred on BBC property and with girls as young as 12.
A current British police investigation has led to the arrest of Savile’s friend, 70s rocker Gary Glitter. Some alleged victims say Savile was at the center of an organized pedophilia ring within the BBC.
Thompson, a 32-year BBC veteran, claims to have known nothing about rumors about Savile over the years, and has said he had no hand in squelching the investigative report about the Savile charges last year. But his accounts and those of others at the BBC conflict and questions remain.
Given how the Times pursued, in its words, “questions about [Catholic Pope] Benedict XVI’s role in the handling of an abuse case while he was an archbishop in Germany,” the paper’s downplaying of questions about Thompson is particularly hypocritical.
During a two-month period in 2010, The Times ran 64 stories on Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandals then emerging in Europe. Twenty of those pieces opened with sentences linking Pope Benedict to abuse cases, and 13 of them ran on the front page.
Yet between Oct. 14 and Nov. 6, 2012, the Times ran just 16 news stories mentioning the Savile controversy. Only 10 of them mentioned Thompson and his imminent employment as CEO with the newspaper, and just one story on Savile made the cover.
Two years ago, The Times engaged in a frenzied effort to link the head of the Catholic Church to sex abuse scandals, plastering accusations on its front page day after day. Now, to learn of charges linking the new head of the
Times to a sex abuse scandal, readers must go to the Europe page of the International section. The same crime, the same newspaper. Two very different approaches to reporting.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He served as Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, before spending more than two decades in charge of the Vatican's doctrinal arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was also responsible for investigating sexual abuse cases.
[It was made responsible for it only after 2001, when the scandal about abusive sex-offender priests erupted in the United States.]
In 2004, before he became Pope, Ratzinger reopened the case against Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ order of priests who was suspected of mass abuse of students under his care. In May 2006 the Pope disciplined Maciel. The Pope also met with abuse victims in Boston in 2008.
[And subsequently, in Australia, Malta, the UK and Germany.]
Yet in the spring of 2010, as Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger was accused of allowing a pedophile priest to return to ministry when he served as archbishop of Munich in 1980. A separate allegation held that as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1990s he failed to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had abused deaf children 30 years before.
The New York Times couldn’t get enough of the story, and rather than making the pedophile priests or their victims the focus of reporting, the paper made the story about the Pope.
Even before the 1980 Munich case surfaced, the Times connected the Pope to the sex abuse scandals through his brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, who served as a choir director connected to a boarding school where former students alleged abuse. That March 10, 2010, story opened
[re-opened] the floodgates on the paper's coverage of sex abuse in the Church.
In just over two months, the Times ran 64 news stories on the Pope addressing sex abuse scandals in the church, including in places like Ireland and California. The Times linked Benedict to the Wisconsin and Munich cases in 31 percent of those stories, including six of the first ten. Furthermore, 13 of those stories landed on the front page.
“A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made ‘serious mistakes’ in handling an abuse case while the Pope served as its archbishop,” began a front page story on March 13.
Three days later, another front page article began, “The priest at the center of a German sexual-abuse scandal that has embroiled Pope Benedict XVI continued working with children for more than 30 years, even though a German court convicted him of molesting boys.”
The lead of a March 25 front page article read, “Top Vatican officials – including the future Pope Benedict XVI – did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.”
On that story, however, at least one Times op-ed columnist was more circumspect. That charge, wrote conservative Ross Douthat on March 28, “seems unfair. The case was finally forwarded to the Vatican by the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland,
more than 20 years after the last allegation of abuse. With the approval of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the statute of limitations was waived and a canonical trial ordered. It was only suspended because the priest was terminally ill; indeed, pretrial proceedings were halted just before he died.”
The Times’s attempt to link Benedict to abuse cover-up in that case prompted an unusual response from Cardinal William J. Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Here's how the Times’s Rachel Donadio, target of much of the Vatican's criticisms, covered it on April 1:
A top Vatican official issued a detailed defense of Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of sexual abuse cases and extensively criticized The New York Times’s coverage, both in its news and editorial pages, as unfair to the pope and the church.
In a rare interview and a 2,400-word statement posted Wednesday on the Vatican Web site, the official, Cardinal William J. Levada, an American who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, praised Pope Benedict for vigorously investigating and prosecuting sexual abuse cases. He said The Times’s coverage had been “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness.”
Cardinal Levada singled out several Times reporters and columnists for criticism, focusing particularly on an article describing failed efforts by Wisconsin church officials to persuade the Vatican to defrock a priest who had abused as many as 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1974. The pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office when the case was referred there, in 1996.
He said the article wrongly “attributed the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of diocesan decisions at the time.” On Wednesday, the archbishop of Milwaukee said the pope should not be held responsible for mistakes that were made in Wisconsin, according to The Associated Press.
The Times, however, continued to pound the drum, saying the Pope faced “growing pressure to address his role in the handling of sexual abuse cases over the years.” Even an Arts section article on a string recital at the Vatican couldn’t resist leading with the scandals:
It had been a tough week for Pope Benedict XVI. Accusations about child abuse within the church continued to multiply. The focus of attack turned personal, with claims of cover-ups and quiet interventions in the Munich archdiocese decades ago, when the pope — then known as Joseph Ratzinger — was its archbishop. And if that weren’t enough, there were news reports of unholy happenings in the Regensburger Domspatzen, the celebrated German boys’ choir that the pope’s brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, directed for 30 years, though Monsignor Ratzinger was not implicated .
On it went.
In an April 11, Week in Review piece, Daniel Wakin even talked of Benedict resigning. “He is elected for life, by a group of elderly men infused with the will of God,” Wakin sneered. “People address him as Holy Father, not Mr. President. After bishop of Rome, his second title is vicar of Jesus Christ. Can a man like this quit his job?”
The paper’s heated coverage finally cooled after a May 12 story, "Pope Issues Forceful Statement on Sexual Abuse Crisis."
[The 'cooling' was not because the Pope had issued a statement but because after weeks of the most tenacious raking in the muck and raiding any closet they could for possible skeletons, neither the Times nor its equally assiduous sewer-dredging partner in crime, the AP, could substantiate their worst even if very tenuous allegations against Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, nor could they scavenge any new 'stories' that could even remotely link him to the sex abuses directly or indirectly. To think they 'cooled off' for any other reason than sheer lack of proof or any iota of salacious 'fact' that they could mine for the worst of innuendos is to be delusional and willfully blind to the media power games as played against the Church.]
The Times was nothing if not zealous in its determination to make the Church scandals that came to light in 2010 about dereliction of duty at the highest levels of the Church. But the paper has been far less resolute about smoking out a cover-up in the executive suites of an elite media organization – especially when the cover-up may involve a man who is soon to be one of its own.
Mark Thompson, who takes over as president and CEO of The New York Times Company on Nov. 12, was director general of the BBC from 2004 until 2011. He held that position when the BBC’s “Newsnight” program produced and abruptly canceled a segment investigating accusations of pedophilia against eccentric, long-time BBC star Jimmy Savile. The host of “Top of the Pops” and “Jim’ll Fix It” died in 2011 at 84.
In death, Savile now stands accused of sexually abusing more than 300 women and underage girls. Among the horrific allegations, one witness described Savile molesting a brain-dead woman while volunteering at a hospital. More common, but still horrifying, allegations involve raping girls as young as 12.
Rumors and outright allegations had swirled around Savile for decades, and he’d been investigated by police several times. According to some who’d worked with Savile in and out of the BBC over the years, his taste for underage girls was common knowledge.
In December 2011, the BBC’s “Newsnight” prepared a report on the charges, but it was killed by higher-ups in the organization. The next week the BBC ran a series of tribute documentaries to Savile.
Thompson has admitted to being told about the cancellation at a party, though it’s unclear whether he was given the reason for the cancellation. And his account has shifted. Thompson initially said that he didn't know about either the abuse allegations against Savile, or of the “Newsnight” investigation, but later admitted that he had heard that the investigation had been stopped.
“I was not notified or briefed about the Newsnight investigation, nor was I involved in any way in the decision not to complete and air the investigation,” Thompson said in a statement. But later reports indicate his office was informed.
The Times has been considerably less interested in reporting on this scandal than it had about Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church. In an Oct. 25 letter to Times staff about the expressing confidence in Thompson’s veracity, publisher Arthur Sulzberger wrote, “We have dedicated a significant amount of resources to this story and this is evident by the coverage we have provided our readers.”
Not compared to the resources and coverage thrown at the Church two years before. From Oct. 14, 2012, when the story broke in the paper, through Nov. 6, 2012, just 16 Times news stories mentioned the Savile controversy -- only one on the front page. Just 10 mentioned Mark Thompson and his imminent employment as chief executive of the Times.
Much to her credit, Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan called for the paper to “aggressively cover Mark Thompson’s role” in the scandal, and wondered whether the Times would indeed bring Thompson on board.
“His integrity and decision-making are bound to affect The Times and its journalism — profoundly,” Sullivan wrote. “It’s worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job, given this turn of events.” She suggested “publishing an in-depth interview with Mr. Thompson exploring what exactly he knew, and when, about what happened at the BBC.”
The Times hasn’t taken Sullivan up on that suggestion. And unlike Times reporters’ fervent attempts to link Pope Benedict to the sex abuse scandals and coverups on his watch, Thompson’s position as incoming chief executive of the Times only made the lead sentence in two stories. In one of those he was allowed to deny knowing about the squelching of the investigative report.
The Times kept most of its BBC reporting squarely focused on Savile and his alleged crimes. On Oct. 29, in the lone story on the Savile scandal to make the Times front page, Nicholas Kulish (who had contributed a number of stories on the church abuse scandal in 2010) didn’t refer to Thompson until the fifth paragraph.
The more comprehensive stories dealing with Thompson’s role noted discrepancies in his accounts of what he knew about the “Newsnight” investigation, but they appeared in the Times’ International - Europe pages. Outside of the Times public editor and some columnists, the paper has seemed happy to avoid asking hard questions about what Thompson knew and when he knew it.
The difference in the amount and tone of coverage between the BBC scandal and the Church scandal haven’t gone unremarked by Catholics. Catholic League President Bill Donohue noted on Oct. 24, 2012, that Thompson had worked for the BBC since 1979 but claimed that he’d “‘never heard any allegations or received any complaints’ about Savile.”
“If The New York Times were really on this story it would know that none of this is new,” Donohue wrote, citing a report by “British pundit Guido Fawkes: ‘Thompson was tackled about the axing [of the “Newsnight” report exposing Savile] at a pre-Christmas drinks party, so he cannot claim to be ignorant of it.’ Moreover, when the BBC was asked to respond, it refused. Do you know when all of this was reported? On February 9, 2012. If I know it, why doesn’t the New York Times?” Donohue asked.
Stocked with liberal and lapsed Catholics like columnist Maureen Dowd and former editor Bill Keller, who now seems amused that “I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ,”
The New York Times has no love for traditional Catholicism.
But abuse did happen in the church, and it was covered up or handled negligently in many cases. Surely, the journalists of the Times would pursue any such stories with equal vigor. But in the case of Thompson, Savile and the BBC, they have not.
For $5 million per year, Thompson will head a company that, in Sulzberger’s words, believes in “strong, objective journalism that operates without fear or favor, no matter what it is covering.” One would expect the Times to put at least as much energy into reporting on the possibility that its new CEO was involved in a cover-up as it did for the head of a Church few at the paper belong to or agree with.
NB: This article does not even consider the ongoing scandal at the BBC itself where a couple of executives are resigning because they falsely accused a Conservative politician of sex abuse. They ought to have resigned back in 2005 when BBC produced a documentary that directly vilified Joseph Ratzinger by attributing to him a 1962 CDF document in Latin - in 1962, he was a professor of theology at the University of Bonn and had nothing to do with the Vatican - about how bishops should deal with sex offenses and other grave crimes committed by priests and claiming that the Church, in effect, ordered bishops to cover up such offenses - and that this was the basis for all the cover-ups since then. For some reason, the Vatican never officially protested and denounced that calumny and downright falsification, nor did any but a few valiant Catholic bloggers do so. Eventually a few Vatican prelates did speak out against it when a private Italian TV channel broadcast it in 2007, during which the Italian media preponderantly did not raise a single word against the blatant falsehood of the BBC documentary.
So here we have the double standard in reverse to the Thompson case. The BBC caves in and fires top executives because a program slandered a politician, but has not even issued a single word of retraction, much less apology, about its 2005 documentary that slandered Joseph Ratzinger so wrongly!... BTW, for people like the Wakins character quoted in the article - who is typical of his ilk - any object of their hostility and scorn must be 'guilty even if proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt'. Ah, the selective irrationality - or irrational selectivity - of secular 'reason'!]
Meanwhile, the Church soldiers on to deal with the decades of unchecked abuse in the latter decades of the 20th century by the rotten apples in the Lord's orchard, about which she can never do enough, it seems... There's a new burst of secular Schadenfreude in Australia these days...
Cardinal Pell: Church will cooperate
with government investigation but
protests exaggeration of the issue
CANBERRA , Nov. 13 (Reuters) - The head of Australia's powerful Catholic Church acknowledged the "shame" of child sex abuse among the clergy and welcomed a sweeping inquiry on Tuesday, but also warned that the extent of the problem within his church had been exaggerated.
On Monday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard ordered a rare Royal Commission, the highest form of investigation in Australia, into
how churches, government bodies and other organizations have dealt with possibly thousands of child sex abuse claims.
George Pell, Australia's only cardinal, said the Church would cooperate fully with the new inquiry, which can compel witnesses to give evidence and produce documents, and that he did not believe the Catholic church was the main perpetrator.
"We are not interested in denying the extent of misdoing in the Catholic church. We object to it being exaggerated, we object to it being described as 'the only cab on the rank'," said Pell, who is also Archbishop of Sydney.
"We acknowledge, with shame, the extent of the problem and I want to assure you that we have been serious in attempting to eradicate it and deal with it," he told reporters in Sydney.
Gillard called the inquiry in the face of mounting political pressure after explosive reports that orders within the Catholic Church had covered up abuse claims and hindered police inquires over several decades in New South Wales and Victoria, Australia's two most populous states.
Pell denied the Catholic Church actively covered up any child abuse and said comprehensive procedures introduced in 1992 ensured full cooperation with police and swift action against alleged abusers.
"We will cooperate fully. We have nothing we want to hide," Pell said.
Pell also said priests should refuse to hear confessions from suspected child abusers to ensure priests were not then bound by the confidentiality of the confessional.
"If the priest knows beforehand about such a situation, the priest should refuse to hear the confession, that would be my advice. I would never hear the confession of a priest who was suspected of such a thing," he said.
Late on Monday, a former police officer who investigated child abuse for decades, told Australian television the Royal Commission should examine aspects of the Catholic Church such as confession.
Former police officer Peter Fox sparked a nationwide outcry last week when he alleged the Catholic church had covered up abuse by priests in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney. His allegations ultimately led to the new inquiry being called.
Gillard has yet to announce who will preside over it, or its terms of reference. She hopes to finalize the details by the end of this year but has refused to set a time limit on the Royal Commission, which could run for several years.
The Catholic Church is Australia's largest, with 5.4 million followers, representing about one in four Australians.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/11/2012 02:42]