What is the role of journalism? Above all, it is to inform and educate. We know that reliable information is needed for any society to properly work. At the very least, readers deserve accurate information.
What happens when this isn’t the case? That’s the dilemma that befell many news organizations in recent days when a big Catholic news story came across their newsroom desks.
Yes, I’m referring to the botched baptism story out of Arizona last week that made so many headlines. And that’s hard to do considering the ongoing pandemic, the Beijing Olympics and Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Yes, baptism-gate has been all the rage. News coverage of it, however, not so good. More on that later.
To summarize: a priest named Andres Arango, following a church investigation, determined that he’d incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms over more than 20 years. It meant that those who had been baptized in Phoenix, and at his previous parishes in Brazil and San Diego, needed to be baptized again.
What did he do wrong? Arango, who has since resigned after making the mistake, used the wrong pronoun. Instead of saying, “I baptize you in the name of” he used “we.” After diocesan officials found out, they said people who Arango baptized aren’t officially Catholic. That means they weren’t eligible for other sacraments like Holy Communion.
This is where the news coverage got interesting. Once again, on an issue of great importance to Catholic readers and church leaders, secular news outlets assumed the views of one side were normative — even accurate — at the expense of church doctrine. Here at GetReligion, we have a name for that approach (click here for information).
Everyone from The New York Times and USA Today to NPR and local news outlets covered the story. What we learned from the coverage was telling. It was also largely one-sided and inaccurate.
