BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Thursday, August 07, 2003
It depends on the meaning of
"uncovered." This morning, while I was driving to work, I heard a
curious report on the radio. The announcer said that CBS News had
uncovered a confidential 1962 document from the Vatican specifying
how the Catholic Church should respond to complaints of child sexual
abuse.
Curious because I knew that a copy
of the report had been sitting on my desk at work since last week --
and that my colleague Kristen Lombardi had obtained it a few days
earlier than that.
Upon looking into it further, I
learned that the first report on the existence of the document was
published on July 29 in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.
The 923-word page-one piece, by Kathleen Shaw, began like
this:
The hierarchy of the
Catholic church has been instructed by the Vatican at least since
1962 to keep certain cases of clergy sexual abuse secret under
pain of excommunication, according to Boston lawyer Carmen L.
Durso.
A copy of the directive was sent
yesterday to U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan at his Boston
office by Mr. Durso, who said he believes the church has been
obstructing justice.
The next day, the Boston
Herald's Robin Washington covered much the same ground in a story
on page eight. His lead:
A Latin document bearing
the seal of Pope John XXIII outlined a 1962 Vatican procedure for
shielding sexually abusive priests, two lawyers for plaintiffs in
cases against the church maintain.
Yet when the CBS Evening
News began last night, here's how anchor Scott Pelley introduced
the story:
We begin tonight with a
surprising development in the sex-abuse scandal in the Roman
Catholic Church. For decades, priests in this country have abused
children in parish after parish while their superiors covered it
all up. Now it turns out the orders for this cover-up were written
in Rome at the highest levels of the Vatican. Correspondent Vince
Gonzales has uncovered a church document kept secret 40
years, until now.
The transcript does not appear to
be freely available online (I got it from Lexis-Nexis). But you
can read a version of the story on the
CBS News website that
includes this: "CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales has
uncovered a church document kept secret for 40
years."
What is going on here?
Houston lawyer Dan Shea, who
represents some of the alleged victims, is the person who has called
the document to the attention of much of the media. Earlier today he
told me,
"The real credit for this goes
to Kathy Shaw and Robin Washington. Hey, smoke and mirrors." As for
CBS, Shea said, "They interviewed me for the piece. They spent an
hour-and-a-half with me in my office in Houston. And I never even
showed up in the piece."
I couldn't reach Shaw. But
Washington's comment was succinct: "This is ridiculous. It's beyond
the pale."
CBS News spokeswoman Sandy
Genelius, though, defended her network's actions. She said of the
T&G and Herald reports, "I think they did a great
job, and I think that we did our own reporting about it and put a
piece on the air. It's that simple."
Genelius added that Gonzales could
have broadcast his report earlier, but that he expended considerable
effort trying to authenticate the document.
When I asked whether CBS's claim
that Gonzales had "uncovered" the document might be fairly
interpreted as meaning that the network was claiming an exclusive,
she replied, "We never claimed any exclusivity on it, nor would
we."
Well, maybe CBS makes a distinction
between "exclusive" and "uncovered," but I seriously doubt that it's
a distinction any typical news consumer would make.
The broadcast strongly implied that
CBS was breaking news. It wasn't.
posted at 2:52 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
