While Hollywood and The Boston Globe would want you to believe that the new movie Spotlight is an impartial dramatization of the paper's 2002 reporting on sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Boston, the truth is something else entirely.
As Spotlight slowly makes its way to theaters across the country, mainstream media movie reviewers are grossly distorting the truth about the Catholic Church sex abuse story.
This month's historic trip of Pope Francis to the United States cannot halt The New York Times from its relentless obsession with decades-old cases of sex abuse committed by Catholic priests.
Despite the Church's unprecedented corrective measures just in the past dozen years, not to mention nearly $3 billion in settlements and over $85 million in therapy to accusers, one would think it was 1992 all over again in reading the article from Vivian Yee at the Times.
Now that the mainstream media has come around to concluding that Erdely's tale of ceremonial gang rape at UVA was false, we hope that it will revisit her preposterous 2011 story about abuse in the Catholic Church in Philadelphia.
We then hope the mainstream media will begin to question the prevailing media narrative about sex abuse in the Catholic Church that has gone completely unchallenged for decades now. Most stories are now simply retreads of stories of abuse from many decades ago often filled with gross exaggeration, sensationalism, and hysteria.
CBS and 60 Minutes hailed Cardinal Sean O'Malley for his handling of church sex-abuse cases. The lesson here is that if a Church official is willing to criticize the Church over the topic of sex abuse, the media will fête him as a media darling no matter what he has actually done as a Church official.
In a newly released annual audit of abuse by independent experts, it was reported that there were only ten contemporaneous abuse allegations made against priests even deemed "credible" in all of 2013 (out of some 40,000 active priests) and that the "fewest allegations and victims" ever were tabulated since annual reports were first compiled in 2004.
This is obviously good news. But predictably, the mainstream media is notably silent about this very positive report, even though in years past when the numbers were less encouraging, the media fell over themselves to breathlessly report any unflattering statistics which they could dig up.
While young and aspiring fashion models are rarely known to shy away from publicity and recognition, last night's episode of ABC's new Nightline Prime (Sat., 3/29/14) may have revealed personal information that most young girls do not want to divulge to the entire world - information that could theoretically jeopardize their safety.
The episode was about the cut-throat world of young, aspiring models and how model scouts in Brazil are on the hunt for the "next top model," ala Gisele Bundchen and Alessandra Ambrosio, two Brazil natives.
Kudos to New York Post film critic Kyle Smith for knowing a bigoted attack when he sees one.
Philomena is a dreary new movie starring Judi Dench as an elderly Irish woman who as an unwed teen gave birth to a son in 1950s Ireland. Under the care of Catholic nuns, the young boy was adopted by Americans. Many decades later, the woman now embarks on a trip to the States with a dour and depressing journalist (played by Steve Coogan, also a writer of the film) in search of her long-lost son, now a grown man.
The Post entitled Smith's review, "'Philomena' another hateful and boring attack on Catholics," and here is how Smith begins his piece:
Just last week, Boz Tchividjian, a prominent Liberty University law professor and the grandson of Billy Graham, stood before a roomful of journalists and declared that Evangelical missions are a "magnet" for sexual abusers and that Evangelicals "are worse" than the Catholic Church at handling the problem.
Speaking to the annual gathering of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) in Austin, Texas, Tchividjian said that Evangelicals have "sacrificed the souls" of innocent children, and of known data from abuse cases, a shocking 25 percent are repeat cases, he claimed. Tchividjian is also the executive director of an organization called Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), which works on combating abuse in the Evangelical community.
A federal judge has ruled that the creation of a cemetery trust fund in 2007 by then-Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee – the subject of a lot of hysterical coverage a month ago in the New York Times – was a completely legitimate and warranted financial transfer.
"Because these funds were held in trust as prescribed by canon law, they were independent of the general assets and could only be used for their intended and pledged purpose – to care for the resting places of the departed as sacred places under canon law," according to the judge's statement published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Lest there be any remaining doubt that the advocacy group SNAP (Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests) is more about advancing a radical left-wing social agenda than providing actual helpful support for clergy abuse victims, this weekend's annual conference for the group in Washington D.C. is headlining a speech by Eleanor Smeal, the rabid president of the abortion-activist Feminist Majority Foundation.
Smeal's contempt for the Catholic Church cannot be overstated, as she has made it clear that the Catholic Church is her number one obstacle in advancing unfettered abortion-on-demand.
For the past several years, a regular tactic of the anti-Catholic group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has been to angrily accost and hassle prayerful Catholics as they attend Mass on Sunday.
While protesting various aspects of the Church's handling of the abuse scandals, SNAP members have provoked Sunday Mass goers to such an extent that judges have been forced to issue restraining orders and SNAP leaders have been subsequently arrested for violating such orders.
Tossing aside honesty, fairness, and perspective in its desire to browbeat the Catholic Church, HBO serves up healthy doses of factual distortion, misleading claims, and bigoted sources in a new documentary scheduled to begin airing on the network on Monday.
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is the latest project from filmmaker Alex Gibney, who has received accolades in the past for such films as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side.
Reports of rampant child sex abuse committed at an elementary school in Los Angeles continue to explode, but the national media does not seem too interested - at all. On the heels of other local reports involving child sex abuse in L.A. schools, NBC4 in Los Angeles has reported:
"On the same day that attorneys for students at Miramonte Elementary School announced that four additional lawsuits have been filed against LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] over alleged sexual abuse at the school, the district said it faces 189 claims resulting from the scandal ...
"The claims are on behalf of 126 students, with the remainder from their family members, [LAUSD general counsel David] Holmquist said."
One frequent demand from Catholic Church abuse victims is that abusive clerics be laicized or removed from the priesthood as expeditiously and quickly as possible.
So if the Archdiocese of Milwaukee discovered a fast and economical way to make that happen, wouldn't that be a good thing for both victims and the Church? Not according to the New York Times' Laurie Goodstein.
More than a few writers have chimed in on the New York Times' recent obsession with the Vatican's efforts to align the dissident leadership of an organization of nuns with Catholic doctrine.
Real Clear Religion's Rod Dreher, however, should get special notice for his blistering and deadly accurate column with the unforgettable headline, "Maureen Dowd Is an Idiot."
The New York Times' obsession with the Catholic Church reached a new level of hysteria on Friday when an editorial bemoaned that the Vatican is now criticizing American nuns who publicly contradict Church doctrine.
The Times' editorial prompts a number of questions: What concern is it to the Times how the Catholic Church conducts its business? Since when has the Times been worried about Catholic nuns in America?
The media are falling over themselves to relay a salacious report that the Catholic Church in the Netherlands may have surgically castrated "as many as 10 young men" over a half a century ago, in the 1950's.
Perpetual Catholic bashers such as the New York Times, NPR, and the Boston Globe are having a field day trumpeting the tale.
The message from these outlets is clear: "The Catholic Church is bad, bad, bad. The news gets worse every day!"
A closer examination of the facts, however, reveals that there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye.
Tony Ray Thornton, the president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Association of Lubbock, Texas, was arrested on Monday (3/14/12) for exposing his genitals in a park to another man.
A local media outlet reported:
Lubbock police say Tony Thornton, 56, was arrested just before 3:30 Monday afternoon at the baseball fields inside of Mackenzie Park.
He was arrested for indecent exposure and transported to the Lubbock County Detention Center where he remained until 11 a.m. Tuesday, when he posted a bond of $750.
Check out the following alarming headline for a story from National Public Radio (NPR):
“Catholic Church Still Hiding Sexual Predators?”
Wow. That is a provocative and disturbing headline, indeed. The thought that the Catholic Church is “still hiding sexual predators” in 2012 is very troubling. It surely seems to be an article worth investigating.
Years after President George W. Bush has left office, Chris Matthews still cannot resist taking a cheap and groundless shot at the former president. In his latest effort, Matthews has implied that the 43rd President did not write his own memoirs.
On this weekend's The Chris Matthews Show (Sun., 1/15/12), Matthews began his weekly "Tell Me Something I Don't Know Segment" by turning to one of the members on his panel, Michael Duffy, Time magazine's executive editor.
