Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Cleaning up some papers lying around, and speaking of lying....
My diocesan paper prints stories from CNS, the USCCB's official news outlet?

A couple weeks ago, there was a story headlined "Indiana bishop urges Catholics not to participate in Obama protests," and the first paragraph by Chaz Muth repeated that "information" -- but even the most cursory read of the rest of the article made it clear that this was not so, that the bishop in question, his Excellency John M. D'Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, had NOT asked Catholics not to engage in protests, in general.

The actual words of his statement, quoted later in the story, were, "I urge all Catholics and others of good will to stay away from unseemly and unhelpful demonstrations."

I now see that it was not my diocesan paper that was at fault, CNS ran the identical headline, (and the same inaccurate first paragraph,) with the article online.

But curiouser and curiouser -- I wasn't the only one who noticed, hey, that's not what Bishop D'Arcy's statement said!
Bishops D'Arcy noticed, hey, that's not what my statement said!

Yes, CNS was forced to follow up the first, misleading article, with this.

Interesting, huh?
It is clear from the second piece that the Bishop's office specifically contacted CNS to set the record straight because the first article erroneously tried to imply that he was against demonstrations.

So does the second article at least admit that the first was wrong, or explain why the bishop contacted them, or at least so badly worded as to give the wrong impression, or apologize for their misrepresentation of what the Bishop had said?
No, no hint at all that this is a correction.
In fact, that don't even refer to the first article whihc this one serves to contradict.

Which cannot but lead to the less than charitable suspicion that the first misrepresentation was deliberate.

Do they think their readership is stupid and won't notice the contradictions between what they want to, and do, report and what the actual facts are?

1 comment:

Dad29 said...

Yes.

News-outlets assume that NOBODY has access to alternative outlets, such as the 'net.

They live in the 1970's.