I noted this outrageous fact in passing last Sunday, but Phil Lawler says it better - but I didn't get to see his comment till today!
When 200 counts more than 250,000
By Phil Lawler
November 08, 2010
On Sunday there were about 250,000 people in and around the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, cheering for Pope Benedict. There were also about 200 homosexual demonstrators, staging a foolish “kiss-in” in an attempt to embarrass the Pope. Which group gained more media coverage?
Too easy. The gay activists, naturally. Catholics who support the Holy Father are invisible to the mainstream media; critics are visible.
BTW, none of the Italian news reports I read even took note of the fact that Barcelona's huge bullring was filled to capacity with people who chose to follow the Mass on the jumbo screens set up in the arena - something remarkable and rather unprecedented, I should think! And eminently newsworthy.
Dave Pierre has made the same point. That’s not too surprising; the point is an obvious one. But Pierre also picked up on the fact that in her AP story, reporter Nicole Winfield announced that some Spanish women demonstrated, too, “to protest their second-class status in the church.” Thus it was presented to readers-- not as a complaint voiced by some protesters, but as an established fact, relayed by the reporter in her own voice-- that women are second-class Catholics.
Over on the GetReligion site, meanwhile, Mollie noted that
the Sagrada Familia cathedral is acknowledged as one of the most important architectural statements of the past century. So when newspapers could find room for just one photo of Sunday’s ceremony, what picture did they choose? The cathedral? Of course not; the “kiss-in.”
The anti-Catholic bias is nothing new. What’s noteworthy is its increasingly blatant tone. Reporters feel less and less compunction about treating the Church simply as the “bad guy” in their stories.
BTW, there were quite a few stories in the Spanish pro-Church media complaining that those in charge of the Pope's motorcade security in Spain were too stringent, to the point that the Popemobile travelled at 20 mph minimum instead of its usual 7-10 mph, I believe, which allows people along the route to see enough of him and not just a quick flash-by! The level of public discontent about this was understandable. Their point was that Spanish authorities should have known from studying the UK visit - which they did - that a reasonable Popemobile pace is possible.
Colleen Campbell starts by waxing sarcastic in denouncing the AP's deliberately and blatantly dishonest reporting of what the Pope said in Barcelona, but ends up really strong and in earnest on the Pope's message...
What the Pope
really said in Spain
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
www.STLtoday.com
November 11, 2010
From the screeching headlines and sour press reports, you would think Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Spain was a colossal flop. What else could you call a visit from an 83-year-old cleric who spent two straight days ranting against gays and abortion amid swarms of angry protesters? And we all know that's what happened, because the mainstream media told us so.
[Fortunately, not too many media outlets in the USA thought the Pope's visit to Spain was newsworthy enough to even rate being mentioned.]
Never mind that little in the transcripts or live television coverage of the papal visit supported that storyline.
[Which, of course, Average Joe/Jane reader will never see! Nor will he/she ever see any TV coverage of what the Pope said unless they watched the EWTN or Salt and Light broadcasts of the events themselves. And not even all Catholics do that. You have to be specifically interested in a) the Pope, or b) live broadcasts, or their rebroadcast, of papal trips outside Rome, or c) live broadcasts, or their rebroadcast, of any papal event - in ascending order of generality.]
Or that those anti-Pope protests trumpeted as the trip's most newsworthy event were more minuscule than massive. The gay rights activists who staged a "kiss-in" against Benedict in Barcelona numbered about 200. The pilgrims who gathered to cheer him numbered a quarter million.
Let's not dwell on numbers. What matters are words, and according to the Associated Press, Benedict devoted his to "attacking" and "blasting" Spain's lax abortion and marriage laws.
[Fortunately, AP only filed one story that day, which limited the poison somewhat, and the online catalog of worldwide outlets that used the story was far less than those that had used the preceding days' hype about the kiss-in - I supppose because the much-ballyhooed event that promised thousands participating only ended up with 50 couples! Nonetheless, the news agencies took and posted online about half as many photos of the gay demonnstrators as they did of the Pope's motorcade that day... Another data bit: The day before, Nov 6, all the news agencies made much about a protest by a few hundred anti-Church angry-about-everything-and-anything demonstrators in Barcelona. But they said nothing about the thousands who gathered spontaneously near the Archbishop's Palace nearby to welcome the Pope on his late-night arrival from Santiago!
A clear example of misrepresentation by omission - by not reporting anything that does not fit into MSM's prefabricated and lethally poisonous narrative about the Church and this Pope. ]
Not explicitly, of course. Yet astute observers could detect the angry, political subtext of his Sunday homily in Barcelona's newly consecrated Basilica of the Holy Family. The AP spared readers all that papal mumbo jumbo about the beauty of faith and family, and cut to the chase, saying Benedict "railed against same-sex marriage and divorce" and "criticized policies allowing for abortions."
What were the actual words that generated this synopsis of the Pope's homily, one echoed in news reports across Western Europe and America?
['Echoed' only in the sense that they all used the same AP report, not that they had their own reports on the event. Because of course, they did not bother to send their own correspondents. Latin America, Asia and Africa, plus Spain itself, must have accounted for most of the 3,000 journalists who got accreditation and were actually in Spain. One trusts that this majority reported on what they actually saw and heard, not what they wished they had seen (or not seen) and heard.]
Here they are, buried in Benedict's call for more support for working families: "The generous and indissoluble love of a man and a woman is the effective context and foundation of human life in its gestation, birth, growth and natural end."
Simply put, the Pope believes that faithful, lifelong, man-woman marriage is the ideal context for bearing and rearing children. His belief is buttressed by four decades of social science studies showing that children raised by their married mothers and fathers fare better than those raised in other types of families on nearly every measure available.
But enough about the research; back to Benedict's irrational rant. After reiterating Catholic teaching on the 'sacred and inviolable" dignity of human life, the Pope said the Catholic Church "resists every form of denial of human life" and supports "everything that would promote the natural order in the sphere of the institution of the family."
To the 'untrained' ear, that message sounds positive and apolitical. Yet those who interpret the Pope's messages for the masses know better. They remind us, in story after story, that religious leaders who defend traditional values do so angrily, to advance political agendas and protect their power. When the facts fail to fit that template — as they almost always do in the case of gentle, smiling Benedict — they get downplayed or omitted.
There's nothing new about reporters turning measured papal statements into blaring headlines. Nor are such journalists wrong to surmise that Benedict's views challenge the prevailing secular ethos of our age. But in their frenzy to depict the Pope as crotchety culture warrior, they miss the meatiest part of his challenge.
Benedict's fundamental critique of the secular West is not about flawed policies as much as the flawed ideology that drives them: the naïve assumption that we can remember our respect for human rights while forgetting the Judeo-Christian heritage and view of the human person that gave rise to that respect in the first place.
In his quiet, erudite way, he dares us to see faith as a foundation rather than an obstacle to our freedom, to live as if the God of the Bible still matters today, and to ponder what our longings for beauty and infinity tell us about our eternal destiny.
Benedict sounded these themes Sunday, in a 1,900-word homily of which only about 100 words related to the hot-button issues that received all the press.
"At a time in which man claims to be able to build his life without God, as if God had nothing to say to him," the Pope said, architect Antoni Gaudí's remarkable cathedral reminds us "that the secret of authentic originality consists … in returning to one's origin, which is God."
In other words, the transcendent world view of faith is more original and liberating than the materialist one championed by secular sophisticates. Those are provocative words, worthy of serious debate. Too bad skewed papal media coverage ensures that most Americans and Europeans will never hear them.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/11/2010 18:00]