Category: Journalism

AP Anti-Pope Distortions

AP Anti-Pope Distortions — First The New York Times , now Associated Press.

Once respected conveyors of information have now become archetypes of bigots.

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors. It was quickly shown to be false.

On April 9, AP put on the wires that the future Pope Benedict “resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children” in 1985.

Well, lo and behold, it seems those pleas were made by the pervert priest himself , Father Stephen Kiesle, who was seeking dispensation from his vow of celibacy.  It seems Cardinal Ratzinger was not inclined to let him off the hook. You think AP might have  thought that worthwhile to mention that tidbit?

Further, abuse cases at the time were the responsibility of the local diocese, in this case Oakland.

This means, IOW, that Cardinal Ratzinger had no authority to remove Kiesle from the ministry. That, however, doesn’t matter in this case because the Diocese of Oakland had already done so after he was after he was arrested in 1978 on misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct and received three years’ probation in a plea bargain. Kiesle, however, went on to do volunteer work which Oakland Bishop John Cummins kiboshed upon learning that he was doing so.

Kiesle was laicized two years after the controversial letter, on the eve of his 40th birthday which was in keeping with the then policy  of not granting dispensations to priests under the age of 40.

Kiesle was convicted in 2004  of molesting a girl in 1995–note: this was eight years after his defrocking. He was sentenced to six years in prison. He lives today in  California as a registered sex offender.

And has anyone ever wondered at why the same crowd that expresses so much outrage at Pope Benedict is equally outraged at the Boy Scouts policy of not allowing homosexual scout leaders?

AP Anti-Pope Distortions

AP Anti-Pope Distortions

New York Times Lies About Pope

New York Times Lies About Pope — I guess it’s a sign of the Times. The self-esteemed Grey Lady, that paper that likes to bill itself as America’s paper of record appears to have been caught in blatant falsehoods regarding Pope Benedict XVI’s involvement in the priest pedophilia coverup.

Father Raymond J. de Souza, a chaplain at Queen’s University in Ontario, spells it out.

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.

Before addressing the false substance of the story, the following circumstances are worthy of note:

 • The New York Times story had two sources. First, lawyers who currently have a civil suit pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. One of the lawyers, Jeffrey Anderson, also has cases in the United States Supreme Court pending against the Holy See. He has a direct financial interest in the matter being reported.

 • The second source was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, retired archbishop of Milwaukee. He is the most discredited and disgraced bishop in the United States, widely known for mishandling sexual-abuse cases during his tenure, and guilty of using $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to pay hush money to a former homosexual lover who was blackmailing him. Archbishop Weakland had responsibility for the Father Murphy case between 1977 and 1998, when Father Murphy died. He has long been embittered that his maladministration of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee earned him the disfavor of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, long before it was revealed that he had used parishioners’ money to pay off his clandestine lover.  He is prima facie not a reliable source.

• Laurie Goodstein, the author of the New York Times story, has a recent history with Archbishop Weakland.  Last year, upon the release of the disgraced archbishop’s autobiography, she wrote an unusually sympathetic story that buried all the most serious allegations against him (New York Times, May 14, 2009).

 • A demonstration took place in Rome on Friday, coinciding with the publication of the New York Times story. One might ask how American activists would happen to be in Rome distributing the very documents referred to that day in the New York Times. The appearance here is one of a coordinated campaign, rather than disinterested reporting.

It’s possible that bad sources could still provide the truth. But compromised sources scream out for greater scrutiny. Instead of greater scrutiny of the original story, however, news editors the world over simply parroted the New York Times piece. Which leads us the more fundamental problem: The story is not true, according to its own documentation.

The New York Times made available on its own website the supporting documentation for the story. In those documents, Cardinal Ratzinger himself does not take any of the decisions that allegedly frustrated the trial. Letters are addressed to him; responses come from his deputy. Even leaving that aside, though, the gravamen of the charge — that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office impeded some investigation — is proven utterly false.

The documents show that the canonical trial or penal process against Father Murphy was never stopped by anyone. In fact, it was only abandoned days before Father Murphy died. Cardinal Ratzinger never took a decision in the case, according to the documents. His deputy, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, suggested, given that Father Murphy was in failing health and a canonical trial is a complicated matter, that more expeditious means be used to remove him from all ministry.

To repeat: The charge that Cardinal Ratzinger did anything wrong is unsupported by the documentation on which the story was based. He does not appear in the record as taking any decision. His office, in the person of his deputy, Archbishop Bertone, agreed that there should be full canonical trial. When it became apparent that Father Murphy was in failing health, Archbishop Bertone suggested more expeditious means of removing him from any ministry.

Furthermore, under canon law at the time, the principal responsibility for sexual-abuse cases lay with the local bishop. Archbishop Weakland had from 1977 onwards the responsibility of administering penalties to Father Murphy. He did nothing until 1996. It was at that point that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office became involved, and it subsequently did nothing to impede the local process.

The New York Times flatly got the story wrong, according to its own evidence. Readers may want to speculate on why.

Here is the relevant timeline, drawn from the documents the New York Times posted on its own website.

15 May 1974

Abuse by Father Lawrence Murphy is alleged by a former student at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. In fact, accusations against Father Murphy go back more than a decade.

12 September 1974

Father Murphy is granted an official “temporary sick leave” from St. John’s School for the Deaf. He leaves Milwaukee and moves to northern Wisconsin, in the Diocese of Superior, where he lives in a family home with his mother. He has no official assignment from this point until his death in 1998. He does not return to live in Milwaukee. No canonical penalties are pursued against him.

9 July 1980

Officials in the Diocese of Superior write to officials in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee about what ministry Father Murphy might undertake in Superior. Archbishop Rembert Weakland, archbishop of Milwaukee since 1977, has been consulted and says it would be unwise to have Father Murphy return to ministry with the deaf community. There is no indication that Archbishop Weakland foresees any other measures to be taken in the case.

17 July 1996

More than 20 years after the original abuse allegations, Archbishop Weakland writes to Cardinal Ratzinger, claiming that he has only just discovered that Father Murphy’s sexual abuse involved the sacrament of confession — a still more serious canonical crime. The allegations about the abuse of the sacrament of confession were in the original 1974 allegations. Weakland has been archbishop of Milwaukee by this point for 19 years.

It should be noted that for sexual-abuse charges, Archbishop Weakland could have proceeded against Father Murphy at any time. The matter of solicitation in the sacrament of confession requir
ed notifying Rome, but that too could have been done as early as the 1970s.

10 September 1996

Father Murphy is notified that a canonical trial will proceed against him. Until 2001, the local bishop had authority to proceed in such trials. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is now beginning the trial. It is noteworthy that at this point, no reply has been received from Rome indicating that Archbishop Weakland knew he had that authority to proceed.

24 March 1997

Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, advises a canonical trial against Father Murphy.

14 May 1997

Archbishop Weakland writes to Archbishop Bertone to say that the penal process against Father Murphy has been launched, and notes that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has advised him to proceed even though the statute of limitations has expired. In fact, there is no statute of limitations for solicitation in the sacrament of confession.

Throughout the rest of 1997 the preparatory phases of penal process or canonical trial is underway. On 5 January 1998 the Tribunal of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee says that an expedited trial should be concluded within a few months.

12 January 1998

Father Murphy, now less than eight months away from his death, appeals to Cardinal Ratzinger that, given his frail health, he be allowed to live out his days in peace.

6 April 1998

Archbishop Bertone, noting the frail health of Father Murphy and that there have been no new charges in almost 25 years, recommends using pastoral measures to ensure Father Murphy has no ministry, but without the full burden of a penal process. It is only a suggestion, as the local bishop retains control.

13 May 1998

The Bishop of Superior, where the process has been transferred to and where Father Murphy has lived since 1974, rejects the suggestion for pastoral measures. Formal pre-trial proceedings begin on 15 May 1998, continuing the process already begun with the notification that had been issued in September 1996.

30 May 1998

Archbishop Weakland, who is in Rome, meets with officials at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, including Archbishop Bertone but not including Cardinal Ratzinger, to discuss the case. The penal process is ongoing. No decision taken to stop it, but given the difficulties of a trial after 25 years, other options are explored that would more quickly remove Father Murphy from ministry.

19 August 1998

Archbishop Weakland writes that he has halted the canonical trial and penal process against Father Murphy and has immediately begun the process to remove him from ministry — a quicker option.

21 August 1998

Father Murphy dies. His family defies the orders of Archbishop Weakland for a discreet funeral

New York Times Lies About Pope

Things You Might Have Missed

Things that you may not have seen in the local media:

The amendments to Obamacare approved by the House of Representatives yesterday in a  220-207 vote includes ending government subsidies to banks for making student loans giving all lending responsibilities to the federal government. Do you think the feds are going to be as diligent as the banks in chasing down deadbeats and who will have to cover the uncollected debt?

Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of Globovision, Venezuela’s only remaining TV channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez was arrested Thursday and charged  with making remarks “offensive” to the president. Will any prominent Democrat speak out against this?

Oh yeah, and North Korea has threatened nuclear strikes on South Korea and the United States and has apparently just sunk a South Korean ship.

Turn The Light Off For ObamaCare, Inky Covers Tea-partyers


Turn the lights off for ObamaCare. If you don’t you may as well turn them off for the Democratic Party.

Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “Tea-party activists who oppose the legislation outnumbered supporters, with about 200 sign-wielding, slogan-shouting tea partyers attending a morning news conference before Obama arrived” regarding President Obama’s socialism sales pitch at  Arcadia (nee Beaver College) University, yesterday. The story, which ran on page B-1, included a large color photo of the tea-party protesters.

When the Inky stops covering for the left, the game is over.

Granted, they ran a puff-piece beneath it about how Obama’s supporters came out in force, but the treatment in totality was far from the Pavlovian salivating that  the paper gave us in its coverage of the Young Man from Wherever in the Summer of ’08.

Arcadia, btw, did not allow protesters on campus.

Why Does The Left Hate Fox News?

Why Does The Left Hate Fox News? — Fox and Friends this morning featured a report that solid intelligence was obtained from the “underwear bomber” who attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas, and that he has been cooperating with investigators.

Fox indicated that the reason for the cooperation was that the rather gentle handling  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab received during his arrest caused his Nigerian family to support the FBI in encouraging the cooperation.
 
The story was given good play and treated as significant and could be considered  vindication for the Obama Administration’s policy regarding the treatment of terrorists captured in these situations, a policy which was roundly criticized by conservatives.
 
So why does the left hate Fox News? 
 
It’s not because Fox is unwilling to criticize conservatives because it does.
 
It’s not because Fox is unwilling to give liberals a voice because it does.
 
It’s not because Fox is unwilling to give liberals credit for success because it does.
 
It’s because Fox is willing to criticize liberals — which is something no other broadcast news organization is willing to do.
 

 

Here are seven huge flaws in the way liberals think as per John Hawkins:

 

1) Liberals believe they can change human nature.
2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies.
3) Liberals don’t have enough respect for our culture and traditions:
4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy (i.e. they believe that those who agree with them are on the side of the angels regardless of how they behave and those who disagree with them are evil regardless of how they behave or their reasoning. This means they are willing to defend those ranging from the blatantly corrupt such as Barney Frank or Charles Rangle to the tyrannically brutal such as Che Guevera or Hugo Chavez.
5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people.
6) Liberals have too much faith in government.
7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not.

 

The liberals who hate Fox are no different than members of a cult. They hate Fox not because it is unfair or dishonest but because it dares criticize their comfortable religion.

Inky Uphappy Over Free Speech Ruling

The Philadelphia Inquirer  — in its news stories and opinion columns — seems unhappy with yesterday’s 5-4 ruling in which the Supreme Court said that well a privately funded documentary regarding a political figure is just as protected by the First Amendment as, well,  a 60 Minutes documentary regarding a political figure.

The decision in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission  overturns laws prohibiting corporations and unions from contributing to political campaigns.

Sounds bad? Maybe until you realize that what it does is level the field a little between, say, the owner of a chain of pizza shops and George Soros, and would allow that pizza shop owner to attempt to influence an election to the same degree as Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC.

Here’s what the court says:

Although the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” §441b’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions. It is a ban not withstanding the fact that a PAC created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence.

Why would the Inky take issue?

And while on the topic of the Inky, today’s editorial concerns the Luzerne County judge scandal. Still no mention of the party that starts with the letter D.

East Stroudsburg Sex Scandal Fearless Coverage

East Stroudsburg Sex Scandal Fearless Coverage — May the Pocono Record get a Pulitzer Prize for  its reporting of the sex scandal at East Stroudsburg University, which is a state institution administered by the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.

Six current and former students are suing the university, its trustees and current and former administrators alleging  that a former administrator at ESU used money and gifts to repeatedly solicit unwanted sex from them, and that other administrators covered up the matter.

The suit was filed in Monroe County Common Pleas Court last February and moved to U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania a month later

The administrator accused of the homosexual harassment is Isaac Sanders, who was then vice president for university advancement and executive director of the ESU Foundation. He was fired in October 2008, about a year after the first complaints were made.

The latest story describes how one student, a freshman, describes how he was harassed by Sanders and how the superiors of the school’s then  director of diversity and campus mediation attempted to influence his investigation of the matter.

Just in case you might have missed this in the Philadelphia Inquirer or Delaware County Daily Times.

East Stroudsburg Sex Scandal Fearless Coverage

East Stroudsburg Sex Scandal Fearless Coverage

An ‘Educated’ Radnor High Grad, Tea Parties, ‘Climate Change’ And The Philadelphia Inquirer

David Brooks, a 1979 graduate of Radnor High School (Pa.) and the “conservative” columnist for the New York Times, has written a column about the growth of the tea party movement in which he expresses concern about how the ideas of the educated class have fallen from favor.

“The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting,” he said.

Now what Brooks is referring to “educated class” are people who have been certified as educated by self-proclaimed authorities, and their “education” consist mostly of why one must not question those authorities.

Most of that “educated class” does not know the Bible very well — think Howard Dean putting the Book of Job in the New Testament; and the ignorance extends to things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and pretty much most of American History. A noted 1993 poll of Ivy League students showed that 75 percent of them couldn’t identify who defined democracy as “a government of the people, by the people and for the people”, and half of them didn’t know their senators.

Which gets us to “global warming”. The skepticism isn’t about global warming but about whether it is a crisis. There are plenty of people who are not certified as educated by self-proclaimed authorities yet have the brains to understand that  claims should be rejected out-of-hand when someone who has gained financially and politically  by making those claims  has been found not to be forthright in presenting his evidence.

Perhaps, Brooks should re-define his class as the sucker-that-can-be-seen-a-mile-away class.

And that gets us to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the story it ran Saturday in which it attempted to whitewash the deeds of  Michael Mann, the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, whose emails were prominent among those leaked from East Anglia Climate Research Unit showing the entire movement to be an exercise in financially lucrative fear-mongering.

The Inky said:

Mann was affable and calm as he answered the assertions of his critics.The hardest part for him, he said, is having his integrity questioned. Scientists, he said, are “not trained to deal with these kinds of attacks.””My suspicion is, this has been orchestrated at a high level,” he said of the hacking.Behind his desk were a picture of his 4-year-old daughter and aplaque commemorating his contribution to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize,shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mann was the lead author on the group’s 2001 assessment report.

No where does it mention that

— mention that data from East Anglia was destroyed.

— put in context that what Mann was advocating regarding the Climate Research Journal amounted to behind-the-scene censorship of legitimate dissenters.

— show that there was an attempt to distort data to fit the desired conclusion.  Here is an elaboration on what was being attempted

Here is a list of some of the more damning emails. Remember this group was trying to restrict your — not their own or Al Gore’s or Michael Moore’s — energy use, and make you  much poorer.

—

Inky Finally Reports On The Crisis In Obstetrics

The Philadelphia Inquirer, this morning, got around to reporting about the health care crisis facing expectant mothers and their babies.

“Fifteen hospitals in the eight-county Philadelphia region have closed their labor and delivery units since 1999, including two last year,” the Inky noted.

In the last paragraph, the Inquirer finally gets around to explaining the cause via Ken Braithwaite, regional executive of the Delaware Valley Healthcare Council of the Hospital and Healthsystem
Association of Pennsylvania, which represents area hospitals.

“Hospitals are being squeezed by low insurance payments, especially from Medicaid; the high cost of medical liability insurance; and a shortage of obstetricians,” said  Braithwaite.

Ten years ago the doctors were screaming about these issues especially regarding the need for tort reform regarding medical liability.

The Inquirer dismissed these concerns with stories that could have been written by the trial lawyers.

If they did a proper job of journalism the problems would be much less today.

 

Inky Finally Reports On The Crisis In Obstetrics

Stories Missed By The Dino Media In ’09

Stories Missed By The Dino Media In ’09 — Foxnews.com has a slide show on the nine biggest stories missed by the “mainstream” media in 2009, which it says are:

1. The resignation of White House Green Jobs adviser Van Jones which happened after it became public that he thought the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 tragedy.

2. The ACORN tapes which revealed that the government-funded activist organization had no problem with giving advice on how to maximize the financial benefits of underage girls brought to this country illegally for prostitution.

3. How White House science adviser John Holdren has floated draconian ideas as to how to reduce the human population.

4. Climate-gate in which emails leaked from the leading research center for climate change showed the entire global warming movement to be a fraud. (I would have made this #1)

5. How the federal National Endowment for the Arts asked artists to promote President Obama’s political agenda.

6. The connections that Chas Freeman, who President Obama tried to appoint to chair the National Intelligence Council, has to the Chinese and Saudis.

7. The massive Tea Party protests.

8. President Obama’s appointment of Kevin Jennings as “safe school czar”. Jennings has promoted homosexual sex with minors.

9. That Democratic congressional districts have received nearly twice as much money per district as Republican ones.

I think I would add the water shortages in California’s San Joaquin Valley caused by government policy — it is likely to increase the cost of food for all of us; the pending removal of four major hydro-electric dams on the Klamath River on the California-Oregon border to restore a 300-mile migratory route for salmon — so much for global warming; and the attempts by the Obama administration to force Honduras to violate its constitution to  reinstall a law-breaker as president, whose socialism Obama had been sympathetic to.

And something to consider — if we continue to use the phrase “mainstream” to refer to newspapers, magazines and network TV newscasts,  it will soon be an antonym to its present definition.

The phrase, IIRC, was coined by Rush Limbaugh.

Stories Missed By The Dino Media In ’09