This morning, one of my Deacons told me that he had been glued to EWTN for much of the past three days, watching coverage of the World Youth Day. I advertise EWTN (free) in my newsletter every week and have been encouraging people to watch it for what I knew would be "wall to wall" coverage of the World Youth Day events. I did so because I suspected that it would not get very good or balanced coverage in the British media. My Deacon confirmed my suspicions when he said that he had from time to time watched the BBC news which had focussed almost exclusively on the Holy Father's apology for sexual abuse by clergy. Fr Ray Blake fills out the picture: WYD: but the BBC.... Apparently, the BBC did not focus only on the apology but gave space to report on the homosexual activists handing out condoms. Viewers relying on the BBC to find out what is happening in the world would gain the impression that the World Youth Day was an act of a defensive and beleagured religious leader rather than a joyful celebration of youthful faith and Christian hope.
This is utterly iniquitous, cynical and contemptuous bias on the part of our so-called "public service" broadcaster which most people in Britain have to subsidise through the outdated license fee because they use a television.
Last April, Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC was given a platform for in Westminster Cathedral to lecture us about how the BBC was fair and balanced and how a programme could cause people to react in different ways. (Cf. Apologia pro BBC sua.) The coverage of World Youth Day gives the lie to this evasive self-justification. Anyone who watched rolling coverage of the WYD would have seen hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic young people welcoming the Pope and would have heard his sensible, balanced and joyful messages of hope for the Church and the world.
9 comments:
Across the Irish Sea, RTE has not been much different, though their website has given much more coverage than on TV or radio, including one girl's WYD diary.
Apparently they had a one-hour TV programme this morning, though I didn't see it.
Generally speaking, the media prefer bad news to good news.
RTE's main evening news Saturday evening concentrated on the Pope's apology, and gave many broadcast seconds to hearing from members of victim support groups; meanwhile an Irish girl did one of the readings yesterday, though on yesterday evening's news she did get about two seconds of coverage.
Fr. Tim,
The BBC isn't just riddled with sneering secularist bias. That's only part of the problem.
What I find particular distasteful is the BBC's tendency to try and manufacture news rather than just reporting events. In this respect it has become the gutter press of the airwaves.
World Youth Day, for the workaday BBC secularist, is a religious event and by definition boring and irrelevant. So it has to be turned into something controversial -- by focusing on the abuse scandal and gay protesters -- to spice up the story and increase the viewing figures.
Once the story has been given a tendentious twist, the political spin can be supplemented by the candy-floss spin: the story can now be recycled as the raw material for extended coverage on Newsnight, a discussion topic on Question Time, subject matter for a set-piece on the World this Weekend and on-the-hour coverage on the World Service, etc. etc.
I wonder if the Catholic Church can do more here at the front-end to head off this sort of reporting, rather than being at the receiving end of it and only getting a chance to speak when a senior cleric is finally hauled in front of Jeremy Paxman for questioning.
The Abbot of Worth makes a similar point: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article4359844.ece.
Dear Father
Here in Australia as well the local broadcasters were biased, one might even say sectarian, in their coverage.
The 'national' broadcaster, the ABC, is like the younger cousin of the BBC and shares many of its traditions - both good and bad (and gets not a few of its programs from the BBC). However it is systemically leftist and pro-homosexual. (Some of us add an extra letter to its name).
The ABC engaged in an obviously planned campagin from about a week before WYD to smear the Church, in particular Cardinal Pell, having sought out some tragic victims of abuse and ran a series of timed assaults. These were initially gobbled up by the commercial (tabloid) stations, but in the finish even they seemed to baulk at the volume.
The official coverage for WYD was from the SBS (special broadcasting service), initially conceived as a multilingual station catering to Australia's many immigrants. They however now rival the ABC as the champion of sexual excess and perversion (often portrayed as 'art').
The SBS commentary of WYD was inane and unbelievably ignorant at best (but from my professional life I am more than acquainted with how research is anathmea to the fundamentally lazy journalist) and twisted at worst.
They of course wheeled out the 'expert' commentater, the one time MSC priest Paul Collins who is a smiling assassin.
Sadly the commentary for EWTN's coverage of the Mass in St Mary's Cathedral was done by 2 Australians, one the former Dean of the Cathedral (and I'll bet there is a story there ...). It included all manner of revisionist inanity about how the reformed liturgy did this and that including doing away with Mass 'facing the wall'.
The EWTN post-coverage by the Franciscan friars was far more edifying and to the point.
Peter
Sky and CNN showed almost nothing of WYD. Fr Blake hit the nail on the head: organisations which rely on commercial sponsorship cannot bear to cover a message eschewing materialism in favour of spiritual riches.
And I reckon that seeing as the Church does more than any other body to oppose all kinds of sexual degradation; and seeing that the MSM does as much as almost any other body to promote sexual degradation; then it is mighty wierd that the MSM should be so fixated on sexual abuse. If they really cared then they would clean up their own house, as our Holy Father is purifying ours.
If anyone feels like writing a letter to express their feelings on a personal level, I recommend this. Try it. I have. Here is a useful address. More useful, in fact, than the endless complaints procedures that you are offered when you ring up. Here it is:
Mr Mark Thompson Esq
BBC Director General,
ROOM MC4D1 = don`t miss this bit off.
White City
Media Centre
210 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TQ (YES, I KNOW IT USED TO BE QT. IT HAS CHANGED.)
What do you have to lose ?
I take the view that public servants (e.g. MPS) can not operate in a vacuum. They REQUIRE our encouragement AND our criticism. A weakness of the English Psyche is that they do not want to cause offence. This is wholly unbiblical and dishonest.
Get that ink pen out. If you don`t, it`ll only get worse.
I am sorry if I sound bossy, but sometimes we do need to take some responsibility here. I still maintain that we have the media we deserve in this country. We need to wake up.
When the BBC World News was reporting on the Pope's recent trip to Washington DC, they were not content to report on, "The Priest Sex Scandal" The BBC desk anchor man said,"The Pope Will Address The Problem Of Pedophile Bishops".
Edward P. Walton
I agree that the BBC coverage of WYD did not do justice to the holy Father's inspiring message. Liberal secularists will exggerate the abuse issue to knock the church, the real issue being the church's objection to abortion. The truth is that only a tiny number of clergy have ill treated children, fewer proportionatly than social workers of policemen. 50 police personnel were arrested as part of operation Ore which dealt with pederastic (the correct term) pornography.
Here in Sydney, the coverage from certain sectors of the media was transparently pushing an anti-Church agenda until about Wednesday of WYD. At that point, it became obvious to every Sydneysider that our town was full of joyous and peaceful young people whose presence was a rich and abundant blessing. It then became impossible for the media to continue their bias without it being obvious that they are fools and liars.
My friends, please pray that God continues to bless us in Australia, particularly with new vocations to the priesthood.
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