If you have not had a chance to do so, check out the waves of reader comments that we have received in response to GetReligionista Julia Duin's epic post at the end of last week entitled "The scandal of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and why no major media outed him."
As you can see from the headline, a major theme in this post is directly linked to life on the religion-news beat. On a technical level, in terms of journalism craft and ethics, why was it so hard for veteran reporters – like Julia – to nail down the final details of hard-news reports about McCarrick and the years and years of rumors and allegations about his sexual abuse of seminarians (among others)?
Part of it, of course, was getting people to go on the record. In some cases, people even had documentation to help support their horror stories. But, but, but ... They just could not go on the record.
As Duin noted, another reporter from that era has also been writing, day after day, about his own attempts to cover this story. That would be Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher. In typical Dreher fashion he has – even while overseas on a speaking tour – poured out 10,000 words or so worth of posts on this topic.
You really need to dig into that, if this topic is important to you. However, as this weekend's think piece, let me point you to Dreher's piece entitled "Uncle Ted & The Grand Inquisitor" – in part because it offers yet another journalism twist in this sordid drama.
Why was it so hard for journalists to nail down this story? Well, it was easy for Catholics leaders to point at years and years of biased media coverage of the Catholic church and then say, "Well, here we go again." And then there was another twist, on top of that reality.
Hang on, this gets complex. Thus, Dreher writes:
I ... want to mention that some pretty nasty characters – including Cardinal McCarrick – benefit from the media’s biases too. Ordinary Catholics (and others) have a hard time understanding this, because they have this fixed idea that the media hates the Catholic Church, and will go after it on any pretext whatsoever. That’s not entirely true.
