No question, the Times’s worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic worldview. But that is not unusual with newspapers. What makes the Times unique””and what any Catholic bishop ought to understand””is that it is not just the nation’s self-appointed newspaper of record. It is, to paraphrase Chesterton, an institution with the soul of a church. And the church it most resembles in size, organization, internal culture, and international reach is the Roman Catholic Church.
Like the Church of Rome, the Times is a global organization. Even in these reduced economic times, the newspaper’s international network of news bureaus rivals the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. The difference is that Times bureau chiefs are better paid and, in most capitals, more influential. A report from a papal nuncio ends up in a Vatican dossier, but a report from a Times correspondent is published around the world, often with immediate repercussions. With the advent of the Internet, stories from the Times can become other outlets’ news in an ever-ramifying process of global cycling and recycling. That, of course, is exactly what happened with the Times piece on Fr. Murphy, the deceased Wisconsin child molester. The pope speaks twice a year urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world), but the Times does that every day.
Again like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not pronounce with a papal-like editorial “we.” Like the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the editorial board is there to defend received truth as well as advance the paper’s political, social, and cultural agendas. One can no more imagine a Times editorial opposing any form of abortion””to take just one of that magisterium’s articles of faith””than imagine a papal encyclical in favor.
The Times, of course, does not claim to speak infallibly in its judgments on current events. (Neither does the pope.) But to the truly orthodox believers in the Times, its editorials carry the burden of liberal holy writ. As the paper’s first and most acute public editor, Daniel Okrent, once put it, the editorial page is “so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.”
Read it all–another from the long list of post when I get a chance–KSH.
[blockquote]A journalist could spend a lifetime in its newsroom without encountering a dissenter from the institutional ideology.[/blockquote] This is not journalism. It is propaganda. Why is the NYT given a pass and Fox News seen as biased. Don’t tell me there is a difference in quality either. Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol are as articulate as Paul Krugman Maureen Dowd and David Brooks.
My estimation of Kenneth Woodward just went up a couple of notches.
When I was a boy living in the Boston area, my parents subscribed to the Boston Herald, the competitor of the Globe. As far as I know, the Globe is a vassal state of the Times Co. Empire. Somewhere in the late 60’s or early 70’s, the Herald got into financial trouble and my parents began subscribing to the Globe.
There is a Boston paper now calld the Boston Herald. Not living in Boston any more, I don’t know how much like the old Boston Herald the new Herald might be. The Cambridge “Knowledge Class” proabably considered the Herald of the early 70’s a little red-necky. My mom was and is mostly conservative (in the sense people usually mean by that word), and would probably accept the label “conservative” if you asked her.
But after 40 years of reading the Globe’s reporting, if she is talking about someone on the political scene who is considered even mildly conservative, words like “bigot” and “extremist” just slip out of her mouth, as if she can’t help it.
Just an illustration of how seductive the Times Co.’s editorial bias can be.
Pax Christi!
Chuck+
Alas, it’s not just the NY Times that is aggressively liberal and anti-Christian, but especially anti-Catholic. That’s sadly true of much of the world of journalism, both print and broadcast journalism. For whatever reason, the number of committed, practicing Christians in that profession is extraordinarily low. Perhaps the inbred cynicism that tends to go along with the territory of investigative reporting favors a general attitude of skepticism.
Regardless, however, back in the Middle Ages when I used to subscribe to [b]Newsweek[/b] (actually in the 80s), I found reading Kenneth Woodward’s regular religion stories informative and often worthwhile, even if it was clearly skewed by his openly liberal brand of Catholicism. But just look at how that once great weekly has now degenerated into a small, weak, but rabidly anti-traditional Christianity propaganda machine. And under the leadership of Sewanee grad Jon Meacham too.
I think Woodward still shows too much deference to the NYT here. But I appreciate his gentle chiding of the Times for uncritically buying Jeff Anderson’s claims at face value, when that greedy lawyer is the farthest thing from an objective, reliable source.
David Handy+