Journalists Without Ethics? by Robert Royal

By Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, October 23, 2019

With the staggering amount of fake news that makes its way around the Internet and social media these days, it’s difficult not to be sympathetic to critiques of journalists. Yet in the grand tradition of shooting the messenger, there have been some truly stunning efforts recently, by various figures in and around the Vatican, to make it appear that criticisms of Pope Francis and some of his dodgier moves during the current Amazon Synod are simply the scurrilous tactics of so-called “journalists without ethics.”

Earlier this week, for instance, Cardinal Óscar Maradiaga, who heads the pope’s cabinet-like group of cardinal advisors, in an interview with La Repubblica (the Leftist Italian newspaper preferred by the pope and the home of his eccentric sometime interlocutor Eugenio Scalfari), made several outrageous claims.

The Cardinal started by saying, “They [meaning mostly American journalists] want to discredit us, first by portraying us as in large part pedophiles, and now accusing us of financial laxness.”

It’s difficult to know who, precisely, (who) he is referring to here because it’s not as if “they” are all of one mind. Journalistic outlets of all kinds, left and right, North and South American, indeed all over the globe, have only followed the evidence showing that, in addition to the small percentage of priests responsible for the vast majority of sex abuse cases, Vatican figures at the very highest levels have perpetrated abuse themselves or covered up abuse by others. ….

Read more at https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/10/23/journalists-without-ethics/