Abused by the media

The agony of the church’s clergy-sex abuse scandal continues to grind on. The problem—as well as the solution—rests with the church, of course, but as the crisis has unfolded in secular media, there has been criticism of some of the coverage.

While it’s important to neither excuse the sorry actions nor mitigate the pain this scandal has caused many people—victims and ordinary Catholics alike—the scope of secular reporting is worth looking at.

Peter Steinfels is a writer for, among other journals, The New York Times where he is a columnist on religion and ethics. He wrote a lengthy piece for The Tablet, an international Catholic newspaper based in Great Britain, on the coverage mainly by the Boston Globe, the newspaper which spearheaded the story. The article—at 2,700 words, far too long to reprint totally here—tries to adjust the perspective without reducing the blame. The full text is available on-line at: www.thetablet.co.uk and The Catholic New World will provide copies to readers who request them. What follows are excerpts from that article, titled “Abused by the media.”

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There was a newspaper in upstate New York edited by a man fascinated by reports of people struck by lightning. Every time the news agencies carried a story about someone struck by lightning he slapped it on page one. Since about 100 people are killed each year by lightning … readers in this town could well have confronted a headline about death or injury by lightning about every third day.

I imagine a local population cowering indoors at the first drops of rain, their sense of the odds of death-by-lightning-bolt completely skewed. Yet not a single word in the stories they read need have been untrue. The problem would have arisen from the dramatic character of the news, the construction of the central category … the prominent play the stories received, and the absence [providing the] context of population, risks … and causes. …

After months of media blitz most Americans, including normally well-informed Catholics, have a similarly skewed, or at least very imprecise, understanding of the clerical sex scandal which erupted in January—not of the terrible nature of the misconduct itself but of its exact scope, the time frame when it largely occurred, the legal issues involved, and the record of how different bishops handled it at different times.

Between Jan. 6, when the Boston Globe began publishing stories on the pedophile ex-priest John Geoghan, and the news in mid-April that American cardinals and officers of the bishops’ conference would meet the pope and Vatican officials, the Boston newspaper published over 250 stories, many on page one, about the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests.

Those 100 days altered the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. Neither the Middle East violence, nor the war against terrorism, nor the enormous business scandals managed to relegate that story to the back pages. Thousands … of similar articles appeared in other papers, … some echoing the Globe’s discoveries, many applying that newspaper’s investigative energies … to their own dioceses. What the papers spelled out day after day was packaged by news magazines into cover stories, distilled by radio and television into a few brutal phrases, transmuted by the cable networks into shouting matches among talking heads and dramatized in TV specials with ugly details of predatory sex recounted against footage of stained-glass windows and priests raising the host in their consecrated hands. The coverage swelled with the “summit” in the Vatican and peaked only with the June meeting in Dallas of the bishops. By then the story line was well-established: children and young people have been and currently are endangered by molesting priests, and many bishops, perhaps most, have knowingly, even criminally, allowed this to happen.

No one doubts that the news media played a central role in making the sex abuse scandal what it has become. Many church officials … continue to view the scandal as media-driven, even media-manufactured. … The media, on the other hand, appear quite pleased with their work. Between the lines of “Betrayal: The crisis in the Catholic Church” (Little, Brown, 2002), the Boston Globe’s synthesis of its coverage, I sense journalists already preparing acceptance speeches for next year’s Pulitzer Prizes. There have been no serious analyses of the news coverage, just a few scattered articles focusing on whether it has been “anti-Catholic.” Polls showing that overwhelming percentages of Catholics are furious at their bishops and do not consider the news media anti-Catholic are taken as vindication. Obviously this is a circular demonstration, since the reaction of Catholics has been based precisely on what they read, heard and saw in the media. No one … has gone beyond the familiar .. naivete that assumes journalists merely expose the “facts” and do nothing to define their meaning .

Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been widely praised for frank criticism of his colleagues … [at] Dallas. But after commending the media for the attention they had directed to the issue of sexual abuse and the help given victims, he added bluntly: “During these last months, the image of the Catholic hierarchy in this country has been distorted to an extent which I would not have thought possible six months ago.” As far as I know, this “moment of complete candor,” as Bishop Gregory put it, has been ignored by journalists.

Two things make any intelligent assessment of the sex abuse coverage—or of Bishop Gregory’s criticism—difficult. One is an assumption that any criticism of the media amounts to exoneration of the church’s conduct and a minimizing of the harm done to victims. The other is the unrealistic idea of rendering a single verdict on all forms of the news media lumped together. How can one give a collective grade to well-documented investigative reporting in major newspapers, hyperventilating accounts in news magazines, thoughtful … discussions on the Public Broadcasting Service…, and shabby, cliche-ridden TV specials like ABC’s “Bless Me Father, For I have Sinned”? (R. Scott Appleby, the Notre Dame professor whose willingness to criticize the bishops was apparent in his remarks to them in Dallas, felt obliged to circulate … a letter to that program’s producer detailing how a taped interview with him was edited, sentence after sentence, to remove all nuance or balance.)

The stories appeared in a blizzard … . Many were complicated accounts of charges, denials … and legal maneuvers. But some were bombshells: the allegations leading to the resignations of two bishops, for example….

It is hard to describe the nearly overpowering effect of confronting these stories day after day, many featuring graphic descriptions of sexual acts and their psychological impact as recalled by victims. …

The problem lay in the very connective tissue that linked the latest story to all the rest. Given the widespread stereotype of a monolithic church, journalists were actually swift to recognize that when it came to disciplining priests, 194 bishops ruled their own dioceses. But it proved almost impossible not to generalize about “the church” or “the bishops.” Likewise, the better papers usually included the relevant dates in reporting a specific case—“allegations that he abused two teenagers in 1972”—but nevertheless went on to describe the larger story (“the latest in revelations about widespread abuse by pedophile priests”) in terms that could refer to abuse last year as well as a quarter century ago.

The only way around this problem was to confront it head-on, to attempt large-scale reporting that would help the public understand the numbers, the dates, and the range of diocesan policies. A few newspapers did. They were the exceptions.

Without attempting some impossible comprehensive verdict on all the different news media, let me note … some other deficiencies.

What was involved in the American clerical sex abuse crisis was the behavior of some 1.5 per cent of the roughly 150,000 priests who served under hundreds of bishops [over] half a century. During that time psychological understanding, social attitudes and legal expectations and practices regarding molestation of minors changed markedly. So did the church’s attitudes and policies—although often with a distressing lag.

The reasons for that lag, which in some aspects I consider morally culpable, deserve investigation. It is quite another matter, however, implicitly to measure bishops’ decisions, as has been frequently done, as though the bishops possessed—and deliberately and perversely ignored—knowledge and attitudes that were decades later in coming.

Only gradually, and still not consistently, have the media acknowledged that the vast majority of cases involving the reassignment of priests date from the 1960s to the 1980s. The faltering attempts at reform that the bishops began to make in 1985 have been reported not very accurately and usually as evidence of the hierarchy’s negligence. The fact that in the early 1990s many dioceses actually instituted real changes … went largely unexamined by the media… .

In 1992 Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, established a professional, lay-dominated board for reviewing charges and rooting out old offenders; similar procedures were adopted widely in the wake of several notorious cases of serial molesters. Bernardin was central to this episode; indeed, the media’s chastened recoil after trumpeting false accusations against him a year later did much to render coverage of the issue only sporadic for the better part of a decade—which is one of the reasons that this year’s sudden onslaught of charges took Catholics by surprise. It is telling that his name does not appear, however, in the Boston Globe’s book.

In reporting controversy, American journalism aspires to neutrality; statements from opposing points of view are counterpoised so that in theory consumers of news can make up their own minds. If we do not know what is true, the notion goes, at least we can be fair. … [But] which voices are quoted? Who gets the last word? Behind the screen of neutrality, the journalist decides.

The news media tended to bestow credibility heavily on a rather narrow set of experts—lawyers, therapists, and leaders of victims’ groups, .. long locked in legal battles with the bishops. Usually they were given the last word, and usually, no matter what the bishops did, … the last word was “Not enough.” …

… The great weakness was in finding credible spokespeople who could explain the wide variety and genuine complexities of many bishops’ actions. This was as much the fault of the church and circumstances as of the media. … When the Boston Globe’s stories hit, Cardinal Law’s … few efforts at response were inept or inaccurate. Officials of the USCCB … hesitated to jump into a local matter; by the time it was clearly no longer local, a picture of the hierarchy had been painted as so untrustworthy that anything but apologies had the ring of self-serving rationalization. The one kind of response that could have received a hearing was hard data: how many dioceses had established lay-run review boards? Screening in their seminaries? Counseling programs for victims? Exactly how many instances of predatory priests had come to light, over what period of time, and how had they been resolved? Tragically, the national bishops’ conference had never been mandated to collect such information. …

Outrageous things, of course, were revealed by the Globe and other newspapers across America, and a light was shone on dark corners that are all the better for being illuminated. The outrage that the media stirred has led to an overdue national policy to insulate the priesthood from any taint of sexual abuse of minors. But the outrage is of a peculiarly free-floating nature. Untethered to precise knowledge, it is expending itself in general alienation from the Church, or being harnessed to agendas for Church reform. From the left these include demands for more democratic church governance involving the laity and for re-examining priestly celibacy. From the right these include stamping out the “culture of dissent” and scrutinizing homosexuals in seminaries. The danger is that these proposed reforms, instead of being debated on their own merits, may now be driven by seriously distorted media-generated assumptions about priests, bishops, and sexual abuse.

Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager