MediaWatch: February 1995
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: February 1995
- The Newt-Centric Media Universe
- NewsBites: Partisans and Pansies
- Revolving Door: NBC Goes Left with Moyers
- ABC News Argues Voters Don't Really Want Contract with America
- The Tyrannical Pope
- Regulation: A Burden?
- CNN's on the Bill Schneider Contract
- Janet Cooke Award: PBS: Clinton Fails the Liberal Litmus Test
The Tyrannical Pope
Mike Wallace painted the usual media picture of the Catholic Church on the January 22 60 Minutes: an oppressively narrow-minded organization that's out of touch with the modern world. The piece focused on Call to Action, a left-wing group campaigning to change Church doctrine. "Among the things they challenge is the Pope's position on birth control, on women becoming priests, and on priests being able to marry," Wallace asserted, "There's no denying that for many American Catholics, those teachings have lost their appeal."
It's easy to conclude that when Wallace included 25 soundbites from dissenters while not broadcasting one pro-doctrine soundbite. Wallace later conceded to the Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor that "interviews with Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon and George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, prominent lay Catholics who support Church teaching, were not used because producers felt the material was too dissimilar to work with footage from the Call to Action conference."
Wallace characterized the people he interviewed as "hardly wild-eyed radicals, these people from Call to Action. They're sober church-workers, nuns and priests, and just plain concerned Catholics...their ideals formed in the heady age of change back in the '60s." These "sober" people said some shrill unsober things. He recalled that one, Edwina Gately, "was described as a devout Catholic with the tongue of a pagan tart." Gately replied, "Well I'm OK with the `pagan tart,' it's the `devout Catholic' that worries me."
Wallace reminded her that she once said "the Vatican is the only tyranny left in the world today." Wallace talked to Father Mike Flager, who called the Church "spiritually bankrupt." Activist Joan Chitester said "the Church is becoming more imperial."
Wallace also misstated Call to Action's views, explaining that "In many ways, the people at Call to Action admire the Pope: his battle against communism, his attacks on materialism, his demand for justice for the Third World."
But when the communist Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s, a Call to Action press release touted its sending $300,000 in food, clothing, and medical supplies to Nicaragua each month through Quest for Peace to help prop up the bankrupt communist regime.
