Last week, as we noted, Archbishop Timothy Dolan accused the New York Times of being anti-Catholic. The Times‘s Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, discusses the matter with reporters Goodstein and Vitello, as well as columnist Dowd, and suggests that there may be good reason for the appearance of anti-Catholicism:
There is an inherent tension between journalism, which is supposed to be skeptical of authority, and a church that places great emphasis on it.
Ultimately he concludes, to the charge of bias, “I don’t buy it.”
In the comment thread of Dolan’s complaint, the Times‘s Laurie Goodstein responds at length. The response is most accessibly read at dotCommonweal. She answers charges about unfairly focusing on sex abuse cases, and then concludes by citing all the reporting she has done on more laudatory aspects of the Church:
This weekend, I am going to the conference of the American Academy of Religion, the largest society of religion scholars, to receive their top journalism award for a three-part series I did last year on the Catholic Church. The subject was international priests serving in the church, and the series included stories about a Kenyan priest beloved by his Kentucky parishioners, an American vicar who selects foreign priests to serve in his diocese, and why so many young Indians choose vocations in the Catholic Church. To do these pieces, I spent many weeks in American parishes and a week living in a seminary in India. If the Times were “anti-Catholic,” why would it devote the reporting time and three consecutive front page stories to a fair and affectionate look at the contemporary Catholic Church?
Read more at the New York Times and dotCommonweal.