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JUNE
24, 2002
Scandal
is biggest religion crisis in recent memory By Debra L.
Mason Veteran religion reporters are calling the clergy abuse stories the biggest religion story in recent memory. “The scandal appears to be the worst institutional crisis that U.S. Catholicism — or any other U.S. religious body — has ever faced,” said Richard Ostling, one of Associated Press' two full-time religion reporters. Ostling, a longtime religion editor for Time magazine and a former RNA president, has covered the beat since the mid-1960s. Ostling, who traveled
to Rome to join AP’s Vatican correspondent Victor Simpson during the Cardinals’
April meeting there, ranked the scandal up with a handful of other significant
religious events over the past four decades, including: Ostling said the AP’s coverage of the scandal has been a challenge. AP Religion Reporter Rachel Zoll has been covering it largely full-time since January, along with their supervising editor. Ostling has also given it a majority of his time, along with dozens of AP reporters across the country and overseas. Zoll’s widely used story with state-by-state breakdown of numbers of clergy accused in abuse cases relied on input from AP bureaus in 50 states. Interestingly, Sept. 11, 2001, is still the biggest story for the Web site Beliefnet.com. Because of Beliefnet’s multifaith and global reach, RNA member Deborah Caldwell said traffic on Beliefnet.com also indicates that despite the existence of sexual abuse all over the world, the clergy scandal hasn’t yet become an “international event.” Beliefnet worked with ABC News on its April 3 Peter Jennings “crisis in the church” piece in which the staff, including Caldwell, provided bulletin boards, stories and resources to give ABC’s Web site depth. “We also co-wrote and co-sponsored a national poll on the topic,” Caldwell said. “No one is committed to this story full-time here, but we talk about it daily and continue to work every angle. Each day we update our story/resource page on the crisis, and we run everything new that we can find.” Ramifications propel story Despite some trade publication analyses suggesting the press was not aggressive enough in covering the story when it broke a decade ago, some reporters say the story today is different from the pedophilia stories of the 1980s and 1990s. “It’s bigger than the abuse scandal that came out around the book ‘Lead Us Not Into Temptation,’” said the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sandi Dolbee. “There are simply more cases, more action being taken, more ramifications … This could very well make significant, lasting changes in the largest denomination in America.” Other writers work story Although it is a religion story, the story has often been reported by journalists on other beats. In addition, some of the earliest stories and continuing work has been done by investigative reporters. Most of the stories on Poynter’s Clergy Abuse Tracker (www.poynter.com), which lists selected electronic “clips” of new stories daily, are not written by religion reporters. In San Diego, Dolbee said she has a general assignment reporter helping her on the story, which two investigative reporters have also worked on. At U.S. News and World Report, more than half of the stories have been written by reporters other than religion writer Jeffrey Sheler. Much of the work there has been by investigative reporters at the weekly magazine, Sheler said. In Cleveland, The Plain Dealer’s David Briggs said he teamed up with the paper’s court reporter on a project last year after noticing a rise in the number of court cases alleging abuse of minors. “We started last summer, were sidetracked by Sept. 11, but published a three-part series on sex abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in early March,” Briggs said. “Our reporting contributed to some 25 active, former and retired priests being identified by the Catholic Diocese as having faced past allegations of sex abuse.” Of the 25, 12 active priests have been suspended. In Los Angeles, Religion Reporter Larry Stammer cut short a book leave to assist on the story. At The Boston Globe, where the investigative team broke the story in January after the paper went to court to gain access to sealed documents, Religion Reporter Michael Paulson has been working the story full-time. Media on the media Inevitably with a story as big as this, the media analyze the coverage of the story. AJR’s May 2002 issue had a cover story on the piece, as well as a reference to it in its April 2002 issue. Editor and Publisher wrote a March 22 story. And CJR’s May/June, due out soon, includes an article on the priests and the press. In addition, at some large media outlets, people who cover the media have critiqued or commented on coverage. At the Los Angeles Times, editor and columnist Bob Baker has devoted two “newsthinking” columns to a day-by-day “journal” of how coverage of the stories progressed. Articles or columns on media coverage appeared in the The New York Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. The Catholic Press also reviewed coverage, including Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter and several diocesan papers. Overall, most observers have assessed the coverage as fair, balanced and accurate. Complaints from the Roman Catholic leadership have noted that the stories fail to make clear that most allegations are from a decade or more ago, and that the number of pedophilia priests is a small number of the thousands of priests nationwide. The predictable charges of Catholic bashing by a secular media have also occurred, however, notably in some diocesan newspapers. Self-disclosure by journalists Perhaps it is a fear of those accusations of Catholic bashing that has led to another interesting phenomenon of this story: The acknowledgment among some commentators (all non-religion beat reporters that RNA has detected), of their Catholic (or other) faith. Such was the case with Stephanie Salter of The San Francisco Chronicle; E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post; Roy Peter Clark at Poynter.org; Paul Janensch at the online site Ctnow.com; published by the Hartford Courant, Garry Wills in The New York Times; and Jon Meacham of Newsweek (who said he was Episcopalian). At Poynter’s site, Online Editor Bill Mitchell, who posts stories to its clergy abuse tracker, talked to a consortium of Florida diocesan papers about how he is a Notre Dame graduate and on the board of National Catholic Reporter. Several journalists said they are tired of the story and the endless rounds of secrecy shrouding the cases, but don’t expect it to slow significantly until after the Bishops’ meeting in Dallas June 13-15. One aspect rarely mentioned is the emotional toll of the story on the journalists charged with covering it. “For those reporters who have had dozens of cases, the turmoil has been taxing,” Dolbee said. “We are dealing with broken people here, hurting people, and we can’t help but take that brokenness and hurt home with us. “Coping with all this, in the aftermath, would make an interesting discussion topic.”
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