What can I say?
When GetReligion readers see a headline like this one, they send us the URL. In this case, we are talking about a Commentary Magazine piece by Sohrab Ahmari: "How the Media Fails Church Coverage -- Dissociation and projection."
When I receive URLs like that one, I fill them under "weekend think piece material."
So here we go. This one is really obvious, in terms of being something most GetReligion readers are going to want to see. Yes, it's about The Big Story, but not really. The overture begins:
The Catholic Church -- the religious body which I joined in 2016 and which I affirm to be Jesus Christ’s One True Fold -- is going through an ordeal. It is an ordeal, perhaps, of the kind that only comes about once every half a millennium or so. As a believer, my feelings seesaw between fear and joy. I fear for the future of the Church. I take joy in the long overdue cleansing, even if it means breaking the false truce between orthodox and heterodox forces in the Church.
My concerns as a journalist are a different matter. The open war between U.S. bishops, the medieval intrigue of the Roman Curia, the facts and counter-facts and drip-drip of innuendo -- all this is catnip to a working hack. The crisis also holds valuable lessons for all writers, Catholic or not. The most important is this: Always listen to the marginalized, the disgruntled “cranks,” the angry obsessives, those who cry out for justice from the peripheries of powerful institutions.
Most journalists are hardwired to champion the weak and “speak truth to power” and all that. But the grimier incentives of the job can often smother that honorable instinct.
What are the "grimier incentives" of the religion-beat job, to be specific?
Well, it's hard to fight the denominational hands that feed you, in terms of the big religious groups that make headlines over and over. Reporters like to be on the good side of folks who have bushels of valid story tips.
But what happens when the good guys -- you know, the "reformers," the "progressives," the "moderates" -- act like ordinary sinners? What do you do when the evidence against them becomes rather hard to avoid the great sources for all of those stories want you to look away?
Is there such as thing a valid whistleblower who has bad news about the people your publications has always seen as the good guys?
Let's read on:
Truly world-historical journalism usually comes from other sources: from the corporate whistleblower, the fading movie star with a horror story to tell about a big-shot producer, and, yes, the deeply wounded middle-aged man who encountered a demonic priest when he was a young boy. There are plenty of reporters listening to such sources, which is why Theranos has been exposed, the #MeToo movement has emerged, and clerical sexual abuse has been under a spotlight since the 1980s.
The trouble is that sometimes ideology distorts journalists’ sense of who is truly victimized and marginal and deserving of a hearing in a particular setting.
This, I suspect, was one of the reasons Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick -- the amiable, genial, and above all liberal American prelate -- escaped scrutiny for so long. Many journalists, including Catholic ones, impose a prefabricated frame on the Church, in which those who challenge or deemphasize traditional moral doctrines are the downtrodden good guys facing off against the fusty, black-clad reactionaries who pull the real strings. McCarrick was not just one of those modernizing good guys; he was the good guy par excellence.
Want to see an amazing example of news material from a member of the journalism circle known as "Team Ted"?
Read this article. All of it, since it's not all that long.
Here is one more zinger for the post-McCarrick times in which we live:
"Too bad respectable Catholic officials and secular journalists just knew that one should never pay attention to things said on 'conservative Catholic blogs.' "