Editorials
CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 10 Correspondence 306 Editorials 307 Complicity & corruption: Robert E. White 309 Freedom to believe: Timothy Phalan 311 Going to hell by inches: John Garvey...
...Further: All of the top twenty Catholic newsmakers in these 1,876 stories were hierarchs and clerics, beginning with Paul VI (cited 228 times), John Paul II (107), Cardinals Bernardin (51), O'Connor (39), O'Boyle (32), Charles Curran (30)...down to number 20, Hans Kting (13...
...Stranger things have happened...
...and the accomplishments of outstanding Catholics" or that a full half of them featured no debate over church positions...
...Secretary General Javier Perez de Cueltar, his designated nego17May 1991:309...
...There was no evidence that he favored the Isabella campaign...
...Our guess is that no one worried much about what it meant...
...You will also find some areas, like ecumenism and (surprisingly) abortion, where the bean-counting shows more favorable than critical views...
...CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 10 Correspondence 306 Editorials 307 Complicity & corruption: Robert E. White 309 Freedom to believe: Timothy Phalan 311 Going to hell by inches: John Garvey 313 Rabbit loses the race: Rand Richards Cooper 315 Poetry: Robert J. Oberg 318 To die in New Orleans: Michael O'Laughlin 321 Screen: Richard Alleva 323 Stage: Gerald Weales 324 Media: Frank McConnell 325 A search for the 'unfettered self': Paul Baumann 327 BOOKS Why Americans Hate Politics: Wilson Carey McWilliams 331 The Promised Land: Don Wycliff 332 India: Jo McGowan 335 The Conscience of the Eye: Christopher Lasch 336 American Steel: David Bensman 338 Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: Nancy M. Haegel 340 The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor: Crystal Gromer 341 The Litany of the Great River: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels 343 Religious booknotes: Lawrence S. Cunningham 344 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas, New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...You will then find that negative evaluations outnumbered favorable ones by ratios ranging from 51 to 49 (church involvement in politics) to 73 to 27 (celibacy...
...In return, it is alleged, Iran was promised military hardware...
...Copies of the report are available from the Knights of Columbus, 1275 Pennsylvania Ave...
...Better check "none of the above...
...Washington, D.C...
...In rode Ronald Reagan on that white horse of his...
...Back to the calculator: In all of those 1,876 stories about Catholicism, "Media Coverage" identifies 5,644 persons as news sources, of whom 3,978 (70 percent) were identified as Catholic sources...
...It works like this...
...Telephone: (212) 732-0800...
...Obviously, the story could not be properly reported only by running a Vatican announcement...
...But wait...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 15 Dutch St...
...Though Catholicism as religion and the Catholic church as institution are indeed often misperceived in this country, how much mileage is to be gained by efforts to show Catholics as a powerless and picked-upon minority...
...The pity of all this is that there is a real problem (and rather than addressing it, this report is now part of it...
...Sometimes there are problems of cultural ignorance: Commonwealoccasionally fields inquiries from junior staff members of newspapers or, more likely, TV shows that reveal a level of illiteracy about Catholicism and about religion that would make the devil weep...
...Our inability to negotiate a release of the American hostages held in Teheran by the Ayatollah's revolutionaries made Carter look like the perverbial "pitiful giant...
...Without benefit of research, how would you describe these experiences...
...the reporter had to give Fox a chance to have his say--and part of his reply should give at least some liberals firsthand evidence of why he might be in trouble with the Vatican...
...In a climate where acting the victim has become one more form of political manipulation, the church has nothing to gain from whining...
...Go to the calculator: Of 1,876 stories (from the 10,000 total) sampled by the study, the report says that 115 strongly characterized the church as either oppressive or liberating...
...Which of the following propositions reflects your impressions of how the Catholic church is reported in the press and on TV...
...Now, choose between these answers: ! None of the above...
...In some circles the pope is just fair game and forget about the details...
...But the cartoon shows the face of John Paul II in the dress of the queen...
...Or has it...
...Part of the price the church pays for its "countercultural" positions...
...I know of no one who would argue that point...
...Now the New York Times and the respected PBS documentary series "Front Line" have both carried stories exploring the possibility that the late William J. Casey, Reagan's campaign manager and future CIA director, cut a deal with the Iranians in which hostages were not to be released until after the November election...
...New York, N.Y...
...In Journalism 101, the first quiz question would be: Was this a story...
...It is a meticulously carried-out execution of an ill-conceived project which may do more to create complacency about Catholicbashing than to counter it...
...Science has spoken...
...Jane Gross, the Times reporter, wrote: "The Institute [in Culture and Creation Spirituality] has long been the object of criticism by conservative Catholics for its unusual curriculum and faculty, which includes a masseuse, a yoga instructor, an Episcopal vicar turned Zen Buddhist, and a self-described witch, Starhawk...
...Once achieved, the cease-fire might provide the required environment for a definitive peace settlement...
...Surprise surprise, so the hostages were released on the very day President Reagan was inaugurated...
...but in fact the overall picture turns out 308: Commonweal to be painted in subtle shades of gray rather than in the blackand-white of winning and losing sides...
...ET CETERA ONE ELECTION TO GO, PLEASE...
...How about such terms as "conservative Catholics," "patriarchy," "monarchy," and "fascist state...
...There is such a thing as Catholic-bashing in the media...
...Later the story quotes Fox directly: "'The Vatican keeps telling us that the church is not a democracy,' Father Fox said...
...Which is correct...
...But it's not always easy to get at what is offensive about media treatment of the church...
...This meant that these articles contained "emotive" words like "authoritarian" or"rigid" or"emancipating" in a clearly one-sided way...
...A deal between Reagan's men and the mullahs...
...Yes, there is bias here--but the authors of the report don't notice it...
...COMMONWEAL l~P~lnnm~T~u | ~ ; l l l ~ ' ~ J Thin-skinned onsider this multiple choice test about Catholics and the media...
...If you demur from the premises and if you look closely at the actual mix of the findings, you may still derive some valid criticism of the media's performance from the study's tabulation of evaluative opinions...
...Some people suspected that Reagan's victory and the curious release of the hostages was more than a coincidence...
...Ask Mrs...
...Forget that 30 percent of those 1,876 stories deal with noncontroversial "announcements...
...Limit your view only to the explicit opinions evaluating controverted points like sexual morality, birth control, abortion, reform of the church's power structure, dissent in the church, and church involvement in politics...
...The other two are declared the scientific conclusions of a"comprehensive and systematic examination" drawn from ten thousand (yes, 10,000) news items about the Catholic church in the U.S...
...It's a fact and part of the story that Fox has been criticized mostly by people who call themselves "conservative...
...funded by the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights...
...The pope is an anti-Semite...
...All the propositions in our test appear as statements of fact in a major new study on the subject, "Media Coverage of the Catholic Church" (carried out by the Center for Media and Public Affairs...
...A more accurate representation of this data would say: "Only a small percentage of media reports on the church turn out to be highly colored...
...Reagan's astrologer...
...Display advertising correspondence should be sent to Ruth E. Taylor, 11 Graffam Rd., So...
...Portland, Me...
...9 On most controversies involving Catholic teachings, the church comes out on the losing side of the debate as reported in the media...
...How to respond...
...10038...
...An organized antidefamation campaign is one answer, but if it's to be done, 'twere best that it be done well...
...Thomas Aquinas, and other Catholics who have been disciplined over the centuries...
...and there is an implicit assumption that negative and positive evaluative statements should come out fifty-fifty, regardless of the topic, the state of opinion in the church and society, and so on...
...Methodologically, there is an unrealistic division between statements of church teaching by authorities (not counted in these ratios) and positive evaluations of them (which are counted...
...9 The mass media image of Catholics is only slightly better than that of the Nazis...
...But the report itself shows that the hierarchy was the dominant source (41 percent) for presenting Catholic doctrine...
...and 510 (13 percent) were lay people...
...Of the 115 articles, 98 were strongly colored in the "oppressive" direction...
...The Iran contra revelations lent creadence to that view...
...why should they...
...But maybe the church ought to be...
...and "a much smaller number~of statements were provided by dissidents who voiced their discontent or opposition to church policies or actions...
...On occasion, practically all groups--Italians, doctors, blacks, Jews, Arabs, southpaws, Baptists, the rich, farmers, cops, lawyers--feel slighted or scorned or smeared by the media, and sometimes they're right...
...his partisans might well use it to show that the Times is indeed biased--against New Age priests or in favor of the Catholic establishment...
...One out of twenty presented the church as oppressive...
...by the Vatican, today cast himself in the mold of Galileo, St...
...10038...
...There are several serious problems with both the method and the conclusions drawn from it...
...Our answers: "Often," "sometimes," and "it depends...
...Yet, after the emotive words, "conservative," "fascist," "patriarchy," are counted, the story winds up as one more bit of proof of media bias...
...That's a none-too-subtle suggestion of a certain grandiosity on Fox's part...
...On most controversies involving Catholic teachings, the church comes out on the losing end of the issue debate as reported in the media...
...Sometimes the media show bias by omission, as in the Boston newspapers' grossly inadequate coverage of an ACT-UP demonstration at Holy Cross Cathedral last year (Commonweal, September 14, 1990...
...9 The church is overwhelmingly portrayed as an oppressive or authoritarian institution...
...A transvestite...
...These appear in a New York Times story (October 21, 1988) about Matthew Fox's silencing by the Vatican---one story among several that the authors reprint and then dissect to show how they do content analysis...
...then the clergy (34 percent...
...Concentrate on the other half...
...That's a pity...
...TESTIMONY ON EL SALVADOR COMPLICITY & CORRUPTION DEMOCRACY & DEMILITARIZATION he government of E1 Salvador and the Salvadoran revolutionary movement, known as the FMLN, have been meeting in Mexico City, moving haltingly toward an agreement on UN proposals that could lead to a cease-fire in that country's elevenyear-old civil war...
...Alternatively, what does the persistent refusal of diocesan officials to speak up about the problem of pedophilia among the clergy tell us...
...L~ All of the above...
...A careful review of the report with our office calculator raises serious questions about the researchers' methods and judgments and especially about those conclusions expressed in the opening pages...
...Curiously, the researchers pay no attention to the story's lead paragraph: "An obscure Roman Catholic priest, popular on the New Age lecture circuit, but about to be silenced "It's true...
...Isabella Is No Saint," read the headline...
...Did Jesus intend a fascist state?'" Fox is also cited as saying that the church is a "dying patriarchy...
...Choices made by church leaders in seeking or shunning publicity don't always help...
...On what basis then does the study justify its image--~are we call it "emotive"---of the church coming out "on the losing end...
...published in Time magazine, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, or aired by "CBS Evening News" over three five-year periods since 1964), using techniques of content analysis allegedly allowing researchers "to classify the news objectively and systematically, to produce valid measures of news content...
...20004...
...04106 (207) 799-4387, classified advertising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
...The right answer has to be "all of the above...
...And what about that "emotive" language which portrays the church as conservative, oppressive, or irrelevant...
...What are the cartoonist, and the Times, suggesting...
...Consider, for example, the cartoon that accompanied a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece (April 6, 1991) by Kenneth Woodward arguing against the proposed canonization of Queen Isabella--who among other things ordered Jews to become Catholics or get out of Spain...
...Ecclesiologically, the assumption underlying the study identifies "the church" solely with certain official positions or attitudes...
...What exactly does televising the exorcism of a sixteenyear-old girl on "20/20" tell us about Catholicism...
...Thus if more sources are calling for change in the church's power structure or attitudes toward women and minorities than are endorsing the status quo, that gets registered as putting "the church...on the losing end...
...For those old enough to remember, Ronald Reagan's election victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980 owed much to the hostage drama in Iran...
...The degree to which Catholics---or former Catholics--are critical may reflect honest disagreement, and editors don't feel compelled to regard coverage of such disagreements as anti-Catholic...
...In our view, "Media Coverage" demonstrates, first, that its authors and funders don't understand journalism very well, and, second, that they don't know bias when they see it...
...And, to the extent that there really is Catholic-bashing in the media, media-bashing by Catholics will do more harm than good...
...810 (20 percent) were priests...
...Answer: If the Vatican thought Fox was important enough to silence, the Times had to rate the incident as newsworthy...
...But how does it follow that "the church was overwhelmingly portrayed as an oppressive or 17May 1991:307 authoritarian institution" the claim repeated at the report's opening and conclusion, that led off a press release and that has appeared in numerous news stories on the report...
...Well, if you are a regular consumer of the national media, and if your Catholic skin is of average dimensions (neither too thick nor too thin), you may find yourself dissatisfied with coverage of the Catholic church, but not convinced that any of these statements is accurate...
...Offensive...
...A report on media fairness ought to be fair...
...And sometimes journalists are simply dense, as in the familiar dismissal, occasionally subtle, often blatant, of Catholic opposition to abortion as rising purely out of misogyny and medievalism...
...Irritating...
...Fair enough...
...Did Jesus intend a monarchy...
...If accurate, that 5 percent is nothing for the media to brag about...
...In the study's introduction and "executive summary," the proposition about Catholics and Nazis is quoted from another source with evident agreement...
...People like squirrels better than birds...
...Assuming, once again, that you are a regular reader/viewer of the national media, and that you're neither indifferent to nor paranoid about media coverage of the church, we suspect that you couldn't bring yourself to accept"all of the above" as the right answer to the opening quiz--but that you do in fact encounter instances of bias, ignor'ance, stupidity, or simple wrongheadedness in that coverage...
...That's 5 percent of 1,876 stories...
...2,201 (55 percent) of these were members of the hierarchy...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
