The 89 year old Helen Thomas put her foot into it, or should I say her mouth. She used her freedom of speech to say something about the Jews in Israel that didn't go down too well with her employer, the White House or a goodly number of Americans and Israelis. She was fired and removed from her reserved center seat in the White House Press room. What an inglorious end to a long reporting career!
Yet, for the last several months reporters and pundits have been saying and writing some rather scurrilous things about the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict and what Catholics believe. I think of Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times in particular for her anti-Catholic bias in her reporting. No one blinked an eye. Anti-Catholicism in the big business of the media where news and entertainment are now merged into one and owned by the same people, does not elicit the same kind of outrage that an 89 year old reporter received from a brief interview where she was speaking off the cuff.
John Jenkins who has studied the issue of sexual abuse of minors not only in the Catholic Church but elsewhere had a very good article in USA Today. I applaud USA Today for printing it. What gives his story traction is that he is not Catholic and thus has no bias towards us in the positive sense. He's an honest sociologist! He takes his profession seriously. I think his article shows the media bias of the secular press and the fact that reporters have not done their homework. It reveals the true intent of their reporting. My question is when will reporters be fired who are anti-Catholic? Why just poor old Helen Thomas who appeared to be Anti-Israel?
JOHN JENKINS AND THE TRUE STORY ABOUT CATHOLIC SEX ABUSE
3 comments:
Truthfully, I believe it is virtually impossible to be anything but biased as a reporter. Is it possible? Sure, and there are Saints among us too, but they are the exception not the norm.
But more to the point, does it matter that media has bias? It doesn't matter that the NYT or WaPo, or Helen Thomas demonstrate bias because with every passing day the number of people they influence decreases with their market share. Humanity reacts as groups and not as individuals in such situations, and as news sources reveal themselves to be biased, or not credible, people seek other sources of information free from the taint of the bias. The bias in media, or anything else, is only relevant if people accept the reports at face value.
Which raises an interesting point.
In the older, classical, dare I say, "traditional" ways of education, students were taught to do critical thinking, which applied to any subject, made them more intelligent and one could argue, more "useful" in society. Today we send students to school and we create "fill in career field here" but outside their specialty many students are naive and ignorant, barely able to engage in a conversation on current events or basic finance because they lack the ability to analyze.
So I conclude that journalists lost their ability to be impartial because we trained them to be journalists not think for themselves; and the average member of society which swallows the bias is likewise afflicted.
I swear I can envision God pulling his hair out, stomping about heaven screaming; "I gave you free will, and THIS is what you do with it?"
"Poor old Helen Thomas" is right. She is a stooge and was a conduit, and little else, for the information her bosses wanted to disseminate. She was doing exactly that, by the way, when she made her remarks about Israel. Rather than stand up with her, she was trashed by her betters, old a faithful servant though she was.
Anti-Catholic 'reporters' will suffer the same fate when they see Catholics finally sticking to their faith and principles, ejecting false Catholic politicians and other leaders. Like Helen Thomas they are only a face, mouth and pen for the real sources of this bile.
rcg
...and we know who is the real Source of this bile, however, the secular world, and too many Christians, have trouble wrapping their mind around evil as an intelligence bent on domination. Most see evil as some vague notion of bad luck, unhappy endings, or simply a general badness that is just a necessary part of life.
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