CBS News twisting the truth again

By Domenico Bettinelli, Jr. ( articles - email ) | Aug 08, 2003

So CBS News must have heard all of us reading them the riot act for their biased and erroneous reporting on the 1962 Vatican document. Because today they took the extraordinary step of running another report, this time defending their earlier story.

But of course, they couldn't refrain from slanting things to make their point more favorable. For instance, they quote Catholic radio host Jeff Cavins as saying, "My listeners are very upset and I'm hearing a different tone from our listeners. Im hearing them say 'You know what? That crosses the line.'" The report leaves the impression that Jeff and his listeners are upset about the Vatican document. But they weren't. They were upset at CBS' earlier biased report!

So CBS had outright misrepresented the truth by taking Jeff out of context and making him appear to say something he didn't. If they do that with Jeff, how can we trust anything else they say? The whole thing validates everything Bernard Goldberg said in his book, "Bias".

On top of that, all of the report's quotes are given without context, and often without even the whole sentence they're in. Am I suppose to believe those weren't tampered with either?

The fact is that the document dealt with matters of the "internal forum," the confidentiality between priest and penitent, and thus secrecy is called for in order to safeguard, not just the victim, but the whole concept of the internal forum.