Media Abused and Abusing

“Abused by the Media,” while not without its own problems, is a valuable article by Peter Steinfels, religion columnist for the New York Times. Writing not in the Times but in the London-based Tablet, Steinfels’ incisive critique of the media’s coverage—and exploitation—of priestly sex scandals could give comfort to those who claim, wrongly, that the excitements and alarms of the past year are the creation of sensationalistic media driven by anti-Catholic animus. That is not Steinfels’ claim. Whatever the intentions involved, the media brought to public attention, and not least to the attention of Catholics, some things that have gone very wrong in the governance of the Church. As I have said before, a scandal as great as any scandal exposed by the media was the scandal of the bishops’ panicked reaction to the media storm at their Dallas meeting in June.

Steinfels tells the story of an upstate New York newspaper editor who was obsessed with people killed by lightning. Every time, anywhere in the country or the world, the wire services had a story about a death by lightning, the editor splashed it on the front page. “I imagine,” writes Steinfels, “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 (victims of lightning anywhere in the U.S. and sometimes elsewhere), the prominent play the stories received, and the absence of explanatory stories that would have placed these stories into the context of population figures, comparative risks from driving, boating, hunting, or catching cold, and the specific causes for lightning strikes.” Something similar happened, Steinfels suggests, in the case of priests and sexual abuse.

“What was involved in the American clerical sex abuse crisis was the behavior of some 1.5 percent of the roughly 150,000 priests who served under hundreds of bishops in the course of half a century,” Steinfels writes. “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 respects I consider morally culpable, deserve investigation. It is quite another matter, however, implicitly to measure bishops’ decisions as though the bishops possessed—and deliberately and perversely ignored—knowledge and attitudes that were decades later in coming.”

Reporting Religion

Referring to Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church (Little, Brown), which is a synthesis of the Boston Globe ‘s coverage, Steinfels notes that the media appear to be very pleased with their work. “I sense journalists already preparing acceptance speeches for next year’s Pulitzer Prizes,” he writes. I recently spoke to hundreds of reporters at the convention of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA), meeting in Nashville. The lead reporter of the Globe ‘s coverage was also on the program, and he spoke with self-congratulatory glee about that paper’s exposés, sprinkling his remarks with mocking references to Cardinal Law. At the end of his presentation, the applause was, at best, perfunctory.

Much more warmly received was the presentation by David Briggs of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who is also president of RNA. He spoke movingly of how he had first had to come to terms with these questions when reporting on sexual abuse of minors in a Protestant missionary agency, and how the past year’s reporting on the Catholic situation had posed for him painful ethical dilemmas with respect to issues of confidentiality, perspective, and the dangers of playing to stereotypes. In talking privately with other reporters, I was struck by how many gave evidence of an uneasy, if not guilty, conscience about their part in the treatment of the scandals. Again and again, one heard that they had to do what their editors wanted. “My editor made me do it” is, of course, an old line among reporters, but in this case, at least with some, it seemed to be more than a convenient evasion of responsibility.

Steinfels notes that some journalists justify themselves by appealing to polls showing that Catholics are furious at the bishops and do not think the media have been anti-Catholic. “Obviously,” he writes, “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, certainly not the team assembling the Globe ‘s account, has gone beyond the familiar studied naiveté that assumes journalists merely expose the ‘facts’ and do nothing to define their meaning.” As someone familiar with the journalistic arts, he then goes on to detail the ways in which the media are adept at skewing a story by choosing the “experts” they interview, by determining what constitutes “balance,” by selective quotation, and by deciding which “side” gets the first and last word.

“In this case,” says Steinfels, “the news media tended to bestow credibility heavily on a rather narrow set of experts—lawyers, therapists, and leaders of victims’ groups, who had long been locked in legal battles with the bishops.” But then there is also distortion that it is hard to believe is not deliberate. He notes, for instance, that R. Scott Appleby of Notre Dame felt obliged to put on his website a letter to an ABC producer detailing how a taped interview with him was edited, sentence after sentence, to remove all nuance. I can testify, as can almost anyone who deals regularly with the media, to similar experiences. Yet protesting is usually futile, for, as Steinfels notes, “not a single word in the stories need have been untrue.” It is the way the story is framed, and the purpose to which true words are put, that is untrue.

All that having been said, we should not attack the messengers just because we don’t like the message. I agree with Steinfels that some messengers (and their editors) should be attacked, and we should be alert to the systemic distortions of the big business that is “the news.” At the same time, I know—and this was evident again at the RNA convention—how many reporters are devoutly religious (notably evangelical Protestant and Catholic), view their work as a vocation, genuinely want to be fair, and worry about purchasing journalistic plaudits at the price of truth. But the news is a corrupt and corrupting business in ways that go beyond the integrity or intentions of those who are in the business. And, of course, much the same is true of almost any other human enterprise, including religion, when it becomes a business.

A Perspective on “Perspective”

Yet there is a potential danger in Mr. Steinfels’ way of putting things into perspective. Some may conclude that 1.5 percent of 150,000 priests over the course of half a century is not such a big deal. I suppose it depends, in part, upon how serious an offense one thinks the sexual abuse of minors to be. If we knew that 2,250 priests had committed murder or had been guilty of drug dealing in the past fifty years, I expect we would think it a very big deal indeed. I expect we would take it as an indication that something had gone very wrong. There is a necessary distinction between our judgment of the evil of an act and the incidence of an act. Much less than 1.5 percent of the general population commits murder or deals in drugs. Much more than 1.5 percent engages in sexual abuse”and much, much more than 1.5 percent if we use the loose definitions of sexual abuse current today (and adopted by the bishops in Dallas). The difference here, of course, is that we are talking about priests, who presumably are a moral notch above the general population.

What, in fact, appears to be the case is that somewhere around seven hundred priests have been accused or found guilty of sexual abuse in cases concentrated in the period from the late sixties to the early eighties. We are told that close to a billion dollars has been paid in settlements. By almost anybody’s reckoning, that’s real money. The overwhelming majority of cases involve adult men having sex in one form or another with postpubescent and older teenage boys. These relationships are ordinarily called homosexual. Common sense, reinforced by social scientific research of the obvious, tells us that homosexuals are more likely to engage in homosexual relations than heterosexuals. I don’t wish to belabor the self-evident here, but it does seem that a discernible pattern begins to emerge.

Add to this that it is generally admitted that some seminaries and houses of formation did not, over an extended period of time, teach what the Church teaches about sexual morality, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Some seminaries do not just admit it; they boast of it. Such seminaries, and not just a few bishops, are known as being “gay-friendly.” Many priests, over a long period of time, were taught that, the “official” teaching of the Church notwithstanding, sexual relations are inevitable and excusable, or even necessary to psychological and spiritual well-being. Priests who had sex with one another, or with teenage boys, told themselves, and perhaps believed, that it was not a sin. Some priests, and at least a couple of bishops, say that they believe they were involved in a “loving relationship” aimed at helping young men to “come to terms with their sexuality.” Regardless of how sincere these people are, one might say that what they have done is a sign of, for lack of a better term, infidelity. These factors provide a bit more specificity and precision to the more innocuous—sounding proposition that 1.5 percent of 150,000 priests under hundreds of bishops engaged in sexual abuse over the course of half a century.

Unbalanced Balancing

These factors also make somewhat unsatisfying the conclusion to Mr. Steinfels’ otherwise valuable article. He writes that the scandal has also been exploited by people who have different agendas for church reform. “From the left these include demands for more democratic church governance involving the laity and for reexamining 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.”

One wonders if that is not a fine example of the kind of journalistic balancing act that Mr. Steinfels elsewhere criticizes in his article. It provides the appearance of symmetry—“from the left, from the right”—where no symmetry exists. If the scandal is chiefly about priests fiddling with boys, why would more democracy in church government be the solution? So lay people decide whether the church roof is replaced this year or next, or have a say in electing the bishop. So what? As for celibacy, if instances of clerical sexual abuse, including homosexual abuse, are as frequent in churches where the clergy can marry”and the evidence is that they are”celibacy would seem to be, at most, marginally related to the problems that produced the scandals.

The second agenda of reform—the one “from the right”—would seem to be somewhat more pertinent to the problems at hand. I don’t insist on the phrase “culture of dissent,” and “stamping out” sounds awfully heavy handed, but perhaps Mr. Steinfels would agree that homosexual priests who reject the teaching that fiddling with boys is gravely sinful are, all things being equal, more likely to fiddle with boys. As for “scrutinizing” homosexuals in seminaries, as Mr. Steinfels knows, some people think they shouldn’t be in seminaries to begin with. If there are identified or self-identified homosexuals in the seminary—never mind men who declare themselves to be gay—surely he would agree that it would be advisable, as a matter of prudence, to keep an eye on them. Especially if they, as a matter of prurience, are keeping an eye on their fellow seminarians. Unless, of course, as I do not think is the case, Mr. Steinfels thinks that men who intend to do, and approve of doing, things that the Church teaches are gravely sinful should be allowed to take solemn vows of perfect and perpetual chastity.

“Abused by the Media” is, as I say, a useful article. More the pity that the conclusion at which Mr. Steinfels arrives exemplifies the journalistic practices he so incisively criticizes.

Source: Peter Steinfels on Church scandals in the media, Tablet, September, 14, 2002.