Recently in The Press Category

Here's a case study in How To Miss An Opportunity.

On June 6, Archbishop Edwin O'Brien of Baltimore wrote a letter to the Superior General of the Legion of Christ, imposing restrictions on the ministry of that religious institute and of the lay institute Regnum Christi within his diocese.

This is an unusual step for any bishop to take, and Abp. O'Brien was characteristically forthright about the reasons that brought him to the decision -- reasons which almost brought him to banning the two organizations outright. He and the pastors of his diocese repeatedly found themselves surprised by the two groups' activities among the faithful of Baltimore and particularly among young people. Pastors, who are responsible for the spiritual wellbeing of the faithful, do not like such surprises.

In the left-wing NC Reporter, John Allen reported on the event June 12 and interviewed the Archbishop. The reliably orthodox Catholic World News reported on the event on June 11 and cited the Archbishop's letter to the Legion; and then followed up.

The Rome-based press outlet ZENIT, however, which is "promoted by" the Legion, and includes Legion priests among its writers, and is directed by members of Regnum Christi, doesn't appear to have reported on the story at all in its daily news digests.

Now that is the missed opportunity I'm writing about. When a vigorous, orthodox religious community and a vigorous, orthodox lay institute come under the suspicion of a stalwart bishop who holds the primatial see of the United States (in case anyone didn't notice the point), and are placed under restrictions by that same bishop, that's a news event. To say nothing about it in ZENIT's daily news only reinforces the suspicion that the Legion and Regnum have garnered, suspicion which inescapably adheres to ZENIT.

And it's one reason why I am deleting and ignoring the almost daily fundraising e-mails from ZENIT.

Your piece about ex-Catholics who formally withdraw from church membership referred to the act as being "debaptised". It even spoke misleadingly of a "debaptismal certificate", as if the Church were agreeing to cancel someone's baptism. The Church has no such procedure. Baptism is a permanent fact, according to Catholic teaching, and cannot be undone, even if a person leaves the Church. I expect the reporter used this terminology in order to shock listeners and get attention, but it was quite wrong. Did your reporter realize that she was misrepresenting the facts? It only adds to the existing impression that BBC is hostile to the Catholic faith.

The newspapers and bloggers got this one wrong: there is no plan afoot in Iran to make Christians and Jews wear special insignia on their clothing.

To pick up on John's point below about muddle-headedness that favors the enemies of our country, here's an example of AP's thinking in a photo caption:

Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is seen in this April 1998 file photo in Afghanistan....

"Dissident"? Y'know, I don't think the attacks on the US Embassy in Kenya, the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers, the WTC (in 1993 and 2001), and the Pentagon are really summed up by the word "dissident". (And throw in the various attempts to kill Middle- and Near East heads of state, anti-Taliban Afghan leaders, and Iraqi democrats.)

Perhaps AP will start to describe Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski, and the guy who was sending out those anthrax-express letters as "dissidents" too.

After about thirty years, the Benedictine abbey in Pecos, NM may have to give up its somewhat experimental way of life as an unofficial "double" monastery. I say "unofficial" because the men's community was founded in 1955, but the women's community associated with it has never been formally established as a monastery in its own right: the combination was considered a daring experiment when it started in the heyday of charismatic-renewal communities. I think couples and families lived there too for a time.

It seems that the Benedictine higher-ups in Rome and the Congregation for Religious have told the abbot to get this all reorganized in a more conventional way, so that the women would be under their own elected superior, and the women's monastery could have its own property not totally dependent on the goodwill of the monks.

Alas, it's not working out that way. Of the five women who resided there, three have decided to join existing monasteries elsewhere rather than form a new house at Pecos, which would no doubt be a big job. Of course, their departure pretty much scotches the project for the other two, who have to seek another solution.

When the NYT got hold of the story, little gears turned in the reporter's head, and he slotted it into a conventional paradigm: "liberal nuns vs. male hierarchy", and portrayed it as a clampdown:

the women were told by the Vatican that they were not nuns in the opinion of the church

Get the spin? The reporter takes a judgment that's probably a cut-and-dried matter of canonical facts -- e.g., "you didn't go through the usual procedure, so you aren't legally bound by vows as religious sisters; if you want, you can remedy that by doing [XYZ]" -- and he makes it sound like a personal snub based on "opinion".

Then, without having any interviews with the departing sisters (who wisely have been turning down the press), he portrayed them as refuseniks choosing to "leave the monastery altogether rather than submit to the requests from Rome".

Sorry, sisters, this Times guy's trying to draft you into the war of All Women against The Male Vatican Hierarchy. (I think he fooled Mark Shea into believing it.) I salute you for passing up that invitation!

CNN's Aaron Brown just interviewed EWTN's Raymond Arroyo, a resident of New Orleans, for several minutes. Mr. Arroyo got his family -- including his 10-day-old newborn -- to Birmingham in time but, alas, lost his family's restaurant; and his kids have lost the neighborhood where they lived.

Oddly, perhaps amusingly, Brown seemed unaware that Arroyo's the news director from another cable channel. Really, what good is the little earpiece Brown wears if nobody's going to fill him in?

If you knew a bunch of guys who collectively predicted the winning Super Bowl team before the season started, you'd think they were smart but lucky. However, if after 10 seasons they made seven correct Super Bowl predictions, you would think they really had a grasp of the sport.

But if you knew a group that kept insisting they knew everything about football, yet in 10 years they never managed to name one of the Super Bowl teams, much less the winner, you might question whether they understood the dynamics of the game.

The news media are a lot like the latter group of football fans. They've gotten Iraq wrong in so many respects, one wonders why they bother offering any analysis at all. You remember what the "experts" predicted: invading Iraq would provoke the "Arab steet"; unlike the Gulf War, the Iraqis would defend their country to the death; the United States military is unable to fight an insurgency effectively; turnout in the January election will be light; and so forth. (Curiously, they never predicted that we would find no weapons of mass destruction.)

They do continue, though, as in this account of a BBC reporter confidently predicting an imminent Iraqi civil war. There is a great deal of wishful thinking bound up in that remark, but is part of a much larger, much longer pattern: Stalin is our friend and would never do anything nasty. The North Vietnamese are patriots and would never harm their fellow countrymen. Ronald Reagan will start a nuclear war. Sanctions will dislodge Saddam's army from Kuwait....

Primarily, the press makes bad calls because they have a faulty view of how the universe works. Rather than fix their model so they can make more accurate predictions, they continue to insist on the validity of their assumptions.

This manifests itself in odd ways, most prominently in how they analyze President Bush. The reasoning seems to be this: because he is a slack-jawed Texan who lives his faith, and knows nothing about the outside world, the president is a fool. Therefore, everything he does is foolish. Ergo, any specific action or policy is likely to be disastrous.

This also explains why religous coverage is so abysmal, when it exists at all. Most mainstream press members think that religion is a secondary or tertiary characteristic about a person, like height or body weight, something that might or might not affect one's daily life. For most people in the world, it is what they build their lives around. Instead of making bad predictions, the press is simply baffled by the whole subject and resorts to comfortable terms. Thus, clergy are "liberal" or "conservative," not "traditional" or "hererodox."

In a quite different but still related example, you would have thought that a year ago, Moqtada "Mookie" al Sadr was routing the American military and leading a mass Shiite revolt. In reality, most Shiite leaders looked the other way as the gallant men of the Army's First Cavalry Division slayed 5,000 of Mookie's goons. There was no general Shia uprising, and now the would-be revolutionary is trying to get into normal electoral politics. Had the press considered Mookie's lack of status in the Shiite clerical pecking order, they might have realized that few imams would come to his aid.

This is a fixable problem, but it is an open question as to whether the oldline media can reform itself. They pay themselves in flattery, imagining themselves to be master analysts of the universe, and feeding one's own intellectual pride is as addictive as a narcotic. Admitting their errors and making ideological adjustments is possible, but it's not the way to wager.

Stereotyped reactions to Pope Benedict's election are pouring in from the usual suspects:

Reuters: "Arch-Conservative German Elected Pope"

The two writers are obviously stunned; otherwise, they wouldn't be writing nonsense like this:

He was expected to take a tough line against reformist trends in Europe and North America. In a Good Friday Mass this year he said: "How much filth there is in the Church, even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely to Him."

Apparently some people actually want moral and spiritual corruption! For these two Reuters dopes, they constitute "reformist trends"!

The Political Teen has video of Pete's appearance on MSNBC Monday afternoon. Good job!

Good Heavens. The media are on to us!

Not only did AOL link to this blog the other day, but some kind folks at MSNBC dropped us an e-mail invitation, since they like to invite bloggers onto Monica Crowley's show to comment on the news.

We don't know yet whether that's going to actually happen, but if it does, you may see Pete Vere on that cable channel at about 12:30 p.m. Monday. Now, he probably won't have his Alhambra fez on, so just keep an eye out for someone who looks Canadian.