Tornielli, a name that keeps popping up

You know how it is, when you've never heard of someone, or something before, and you suddenly notice it, then you're confronted by it several times, and a pattern begins to emerge.
In my haphazard reading of matter vaticano, I several times read something thoughtful and spinless and insightful, and noted Andrea Tornielli as the source. (There is another name that I've forgotten, also an Italian journalist, and in an equal but opposite way, after reading something bone-headed, sloppy or unjust, I started just expecting an attribution to him as a matter of course.)
Andrea Tornielli writes for Il Giornale, so generally I have to wait for some blogger more erudite than myself to translate his pieces. (Which reminds me, the Schola Scelati, at rehearsal yesterday, were waaaaaaaay impressed that I "know" Italian. "I don't, I figure out some words and I look up others." "Well, you SAY it like you know it." Thank you, Mr Granito! In Italian diction coaching at MSM, I read some assignment aloud one day, and he quoted some TV commercial, "now THAT'S Italian!" and I puffed and preened for about a week on that praise. ButIDigress)
Now Elizabeth Lev is writing over at Zenit about Tornielli's interest in and defense of the memory of, Pius XII.

Generally interesting, but this caught my eye:

[I]n 1998 the chief rabbi of Israel, asked ...."Pius XII, where were you? Why were you silent during the Kristallnacht?"
Two Italian newspapers the next day ran that as their headline, with the subhead "The Shameful Silence of Pius XII."
Tornielli pointed out...Pius XII was not elected until March 1939, four months after the Kristallnacht.[emphasis mine]

To borrow Nick Granito's phrase of praise, now THAT'S journalism.
Why is it so hard? Why does no one fact check? Why does no one understand the difference between primary sources and "well, my cousin says..."
All right, all right, I exaggerate, but in the case of those two Italian papers, "well, some guy making a speech says..."
You know, now that I think about it, it is the same attitude generally displayed by the MSM (not the conservatory, this time,) about Ratzinger the Rottweiler.
And according to Judith Warner in the Times (http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/the-clinton-surprise/index.html) about Hillary Clinton's "electability."
(“I think the one thing we know about Hillary, the one thing we absolutely know, bottom line, [is] she can`t win, right?” is how MSNBC host Tucker Carlson once put it to New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart. “She is unelectable.”)
The “we” world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton — right up until about this week, I think — because they spend an awful lot of time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another.
It's not like you're journalists, or somethin' it's not like it's yer JOB to find out the facts...
Part of it is laziness; part of it is lack of imagination and a kind of cultural amnesia should they have ever accidentally encountered those who are Other, (there is no one more parochial, more insular, more "small town" than people who after much striving, make it to the Big City,); and more and more now, it is is the sheer necessity of self-referentialism for marketing reasons.
It is only natural that "journalists," particularly in broadcast media "spend an awful lot of time talking to ....and interviewing one another. "
After all, that is most of what they are going to be "reporting" on, themselves.
Sometimes it seems half of what passes for news is actually advertisement for other "news" produced by the same conglomerate.
It becomes "news" to report that someone else snagged an interview, to be shown later "on this same station", or it is "news" that something might or might not have happened to someone who is in a movie that just happens to have been produced by this station's parent company and is premiering this weekend, or it is "news" that this doctor wants to tell us about interesting psychological phenomenon which just happens to be afflicting the star of this talk show on our network to which the doctor in question just happens to be a consultant.

And those are only examples of the incestuous instances of reporting on reporting.
There's another trend, maybe worse, where we're too high-minded to report on this rumor, trash, innuendo, non-news, no, no, we'd never stoop so low.... but thank GOD we can report about the fact that someone else is reporting about it! (so as to still attract the viewers who say too much attention is paid to the negative and the sensationalized and the trivial -- but who can't get enough of the stuff.)

I mean, it's funny if Mary McCarthy or whoever (I'm not gonna fact check, I'm not a journalist, I'm just a logorrhoeac civilian,) said "How could Nixon have won? No one I know voted for him!" and has the attitude perfectly encapsulated in that gem.
It's not funny if a would-be journalist exhibits that depth of knowledge.
(Hmmmmm, now that I think of it, there's of little of that in poor Fr Reese, as noted below, isn't there?)