A compromised press delivers not-so-hot news
Schaeffer, Pamela
Earlier this year, a spate of articles in professional publications for journalists criticized U.S. journalists for missing or underestimate ing major stories in three areas vital to public interest: national security, big business, and the Catholic church.
In the January-February issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Parks, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times now serving as interim director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, explored the failure of the press before attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 to warn Americans of the hatred of the United States festering in the Arab world and of the growing threat posed by radical Islam. “The failure was sweeping,” Parks wrote. Although much of the coverage of the attacks and the U.S. response represented “American journalism at its best … many news organizations were playing catch-up.”1
Catch-up was also the order of the day at the nation’s newspapers after the Enron collapse. In the March-April issue of Columbia Journalism Review, contributing editor Scott Sherman explored the press’s negligent role in that unfolding corporate scandal. With a couple of notable exceptions, Sherman asserted, financial publications not only missed the story; until suspicions were belatedly aroused in August, 2001 by the resignation of Jeffrey Skilling, the energy trader’s CEO and president, the coverage of Enron’s leadership had been tantamount to shameless boosterism.2
Then, in the May issue of American Journalism Review, Carl M. Cannon, White House correspondent for National Journal, brooded over why it took so long for reporters to bring to light a festering wound within the Catholic church, the hierarchy’s cover-up of sexual abuse of minors by priests.3 Although evidence of the crimes and the cover-up had been documented episodically over nearly two decades, no news organization had devoted the resources and personnel needed to investigate the scope of the problem nationally, or even regionally, despite the heart-rending consequences for victims.
That the press missed such important stories in areas so clearly in the public interest is proof of what many journalists and a segment of the public already recognized. Long before September 11, long before fraudulent accounting practices at Enron and moral failures of Catholic leaders became daily headline news, the field was undergoing dramatic changes. Increasingly, owners of formerly privately held news organizations are heads of corporate conglomerates who view themselves as accountable first (or only) to shareholders, and are inevitably more concerned with the bottom line than with the press’s ethical responsibility to serve the public.
Core principles of ethical journalism, as I understood them when I entered the field in the late 1970s, are rooted in responsibility to help maintain the informed citizenry so vital to a democratic republic. That responsibility entails a commitment to tell the public what it needs to know, no matter how controversial, unpleasant to hear, or antithetical to one’s personal views. Journalists were expected to be skeptical of power and maintain independence from powerful groups or individuals, to dig beneath the surface, to render facts impartially and within a context that facilitates understanding, and, where demanded by a complexity of issues, to offer multiple and diverse informed opinions that invite analysis. Courage was expected when pressures, whether internal or external, made it difficult to perform those duties.
Granted, doubts about the notion of objectivity raised by experts in many fields, ranging from science, to education, to journalism, have prompted journalists to acknowledge that balance and fairness, rather than impartiality or detachment, may be a better measure of professional ethics. Balance and fairness require imparting information and points of view relevant to understanding an issue, whether they conform to personal opinion or not. While personal views on many issues may be inevitable, ethical journalists recognize the need for vigilance to ensure that selection and presentation of information are not colored by one’s biases.
In the late 1990s, a group of journalists, distressed over the erosion of journalism’s core principles and facing widespread evidence of mounting public distrust, formed an organization known as the Committee of Concerned Journalists. In the committee’s view, the profession is at serious risk in an environment where the demands of business increasingly determine the amount and quality of news. The committee’s mission is to “clarify and renew journalists’ faith” in the core principles and functions of the profession, to help the public understand them better, and to educate owners and managers of news organizations so that they can more fully recognize their social (not just their financial) value. A major element of that social value is the newspaper’s role as institutional watchdog. The public has a right to expect journalists to “monitor power and give voice to the voiceless,” the committee stated in its “Citizens Bill of Journalism Rights.”4 Since its founding, the organization has attracted hundreds of members, including scholars and prominent journalists.
CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND JOURNALISM: COMMON GROUND
As a Christian and a student of theology, I am fortunate to have been formed as a journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Before I arrived at the paper in 1977, 1 was already familiar with its value-charged platform. Written in 1907 by the first Joseph Pulitzer, who founded the PostDispatch in 1878, the platform has been described as the newspaper’s conscience. Although it lays out the mission of a secular newspaper, its language has deep theological resonances. I continue to be deeply inspired by it, though I left the paper more than a decade ago. Many journalists outside the Post-Dispatch have told me they have been inspired by it too. The platform is concise enough to print every day on the paper’s masthead:
I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
Readers of this journal will understand the platform’s congruence with values at the heart of Christian ethics: its emphasis on truth-telling and justice, its warnings about a privileged establishment, its call for compassion and support for people who are poor and weak.
Interested observers have noted in recent years that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is no longer the crusading force it once was. Similar criticisms have been leveled at papers around the country. Journalists at large metropolitan dailies often say their papers have “gone soft” and lack the staff, resources, and commitment needed to tackle complex issues or go after hard-to-get stories. There is undoubtedly some truth in the charges. Changes in the newspaper business over the past two decades are having serious effects on the field.
The beginning of the end of two-newspaper towns came in the 1980s, as afternoon papers, facing stiff competition from the evening news, fell like dominoes. Meanwhile, efforts to combat incursions of television news on their readership prompted often-restless efforts at redesign, content realignments, and mandates to write shorter stories. In many cities, lack of competition allowed profit-driven executives to cut staffs and budgets, rely increasingly on wire reports for national and foreign news, and become less aggressive in developing local stories or pursuing the sorts of investigations that are the hallmark of crusading, justice-oriented journalism.
Efforts to counter eroding public support spawned a controversial new philosophy that gained currency in the 1990s. Labeled “Public Journalism,” or “Civic Journalism,” its goal was to reconnect newspapers with readers through new models of reporting that downplayed conflict and facilitated consensus, and through new models of interaction that invited readers to engage in various ways with the people who deliver the news. Critics complained that the trend was driven by grant money, consultants, and focus groups formed to give newspaper executives information about what readers want-all serving to deflect attention from the time-honored activities of rooting out corruption, opposing privilege, and lending support to people who have no voice. Next came the Internet and the proliferation of websites that compete with news organizations as sources of public information.
Journalism has always been a business, but multiple owners ensured diversity of opinions, and competition in individual markets provided a system of checks and balances that served as a measure of journalistic credibility. Under new, profit-driven models of ownership, that diversity is disappearing. In a recent book, The Age of Corporate Newspapering: Leaving Readers Behind, the authors wrote, “A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies.”5 In recent years, community-oriented newspapers in smaller markets have changed hands, sometimes several times. Chains have been gobbled up by bigger chains, conglomerates by bigger conglomerates, culminating last year in the mind-boggling merger of Time Warner and AOL. In early 2000, Chicago’s Tribune Company bought Times Mirror, which publishes the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other smaller papers. The result, the authors report, is that the Tribune Company, combined with Knight Ridder and Gannett-which publishes one of every seven newspapers sold in America-now own a quarter of the daily newspaper circulation in the United States.
GOING EASY ON RELIGION
With the Pulitzer platform as a backdrop, I would like to examine the three stories that journalists recently have expressed culpability for having missed or downplayed. Each exemplifies one or more of the previously noted principles that are basic to both journalism and Christian ethics, yet are threatened by economic shifts in the field. Together, the three serve to demonstrate why concerned journalists are sounding alarms about the industry’s race for profits, and why citizens should be concerned.
I will begin with the story of sex abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, affording it a considerably more detailed treatment here than the other two stories, because, among the three, it is the issue I know best. As a reporter specializing for more than twenty years in coverage of religion, I have long lamented that the problem of sex abuse by clergy has failed to engage the public, elicit outrage, and spur reform. As numerous reporters noted last spring, amid mounting accusations, legal battles, and news reports, the charges of sex abuse by priests were hardly “new news.”
Articles and editorials on the topic have appeared in the press for the past eighteen years, beginning in 1984, when civil and criminal charges were filed against the Reverend Gilbert Gauthe. The following year, U.S. bishops received a ninety-two-page report, backed with one hundred pages of supporting evidence, documenting widespread occurrences of such crimes. Authors of the report, who included two priests, urged bishops to act vigorously to deal with abusive priests, including removing them from service. Based on large settlements already paid, the authors projected that the problems would cost dioceses more than one billion dollars, an estimate almost certain to seem tame in light of the hundreds of new lawsuits filed this year. Louisiana writer Jason Berry covered the Gauthe story for National Catholic Reporter, contributed to other stories on the issue, and went on to publish a book on the subject in 1992.6
In 1993, bishops formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse and, for the first time, put the issue on the agenda of their national meeting. Nonetheless, recent revelations are proof of how ineffective the bishops’-and the press’s-responses had previously been.
Meanwhile, many other cases came to light, not just in the United States, but worldwide. The National Catholic Reporter, an alternative newspaper that operates with the same independence and standards as the secular press, but without the profit motive, continued to write about the problem, but lacked resources needed for a national investigation. As a reporter for the paper in 1997, 1 did cover a trial pitting eleven plaintiffs against the Diocese of Dallas, which culminated in a jury award of $119 million to the victims. The paper published an editorial after the trial expressing exasperation, but aimed its message at bishops and reformminded Catholics. In retrospect, the editorial might have included an exhortation to news organizations able to marshal sufficient resources to uncover the scope of the problem, or to Catholic readers in a position to demand reform. Instead, the editorial called on bishops themselves-in many cases, men with a vested interest in preventing the problems from becoming public-to express outrage over victims’ sufferings:
Twelve years have passed since NCR revealed to the wider world that some Catholic priests were betraying their priesthood in the most heinous way by sexually abusing children. One might reasonably expect that by now the scandal would have been subdued, that church leaders would have done everything necessary to rekindle the trust of the everyday Catholic and to reclaim the church and the priesthood for the pursuit of holiness. Instead we have had twelve years of bishops and others, with a few notable exceptions, doing what was minimally required, too often driven by legal and financial imperatives rather than by justifiable outrage at the violation of innocence and by heartfelt pastoral care for the victims.7
For this topic, the sustained focus of which the press is clearly capable-witness the Clinton-Lewinsky affair-had to wait until 2002. The ground for the Boston probe was laid by a reporter for an alternative publication, The Boston Phoenix. In a story published in March, 2001, reporter Kristen Lombardi strongly hinted at the scope of the problem in a compelling account of the serial crimes of the Reverend John Goeghan, and blamed Cardinal Bernard Law for creating the conditions that allowed Goeghan to continue to prey on children. A year later, The Boston Globe pushed for sealed court documents in the Goeghan case to be opened, and learned through investigation that the archdiocese had settled some seventy claims against priests in court. The story began to gather steam and finally, nearly two decades after the problem of abusive clergy first came to light, captured sustained attention from the press and generated the outrage and compassion from the public that victims had waited for too long.
Cannon pointed out in his article in American Journalism Review that the public response to the revelations of sexual abuse by clergy had been “bittersweet” for those few journalists, most notably Jason Berry, who had pressed for more aggressive coverage of the issue. Cannon noted that Berry’s account of Gauthe’s crimes in Louisiana had been rejected by Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Nation, and the New York Times Magazine. Except for the local paper in Lafayette, the Times of Acadiana, only National Catholic Reporter would take it on. Further, Cannon notes, Berry collected thirty rejections for his book proposal before Doubleday was persuaded to award a contract.
Even in the eighteen years that followed, the scandal “did not explode full-blown into the public consciousness as we thought it might,” Cannon wrote. An examination of journalistic conscience prompted him to ask, “Did we give up on this issue too early, thereby letting the victims down? Did we naively conclude that the institutional problems within the church had been addressed? Did we skip off to other endeavors-in my case the 1988 presidential campaign-when our real obligation was to keep turning over rocks on the better, albeit more unpleasant story?”
“What does it take,” he wondered finally, for a scandal to erupt “into a major national news story, and are there lessons to be learned for investigative reporters and journalism as a whole?”
Cannon listed several reasons the press might have shied away from the story. First, it was hard to convince editors, and by extension, the public, that the hierarchy of a respected church could condone such evils. Could the truth really be this ugly? The risk of backlash for newspapers treading on such formerly hallowed ground was high, particularly if a report later proved to be exaggerated or an accusation turned out to be false. “For those who shied away from taking on a powerful institution… the Bernardin case gave them an out,” Cannon wrote. Further, he noted, few Catholics wanted to face the reality a decade ago. For anyone looking for a warning flag, one went up with the apparently false allegations against Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in 1993.
Perhaps the full dimensions of the story had to wait until Catholics were ready to hear the bad news-and that includes journalists themselves, given that many who worked on the story in Boston and elsewhere are Catholic. Influential church leaders interested in keeping their distance from the press had been able to rely on support from large numbers of Catholic laity before the recent flood of news reports convinced even the most loyal Catholics that the hierarchy had betrayed their trust. My own experience shows that, while a minority of readers has long been eager for the secular press to hold churches accountable in a way that church-owned publications are highly unlikely to do, many more seem to want to see those institutions presented only in a good light. The result is that newspapers often have treated churches with a light hand, to the detriment of the public, which accords those churches special tax-exempt status in return for a commitment to serve the common good, and ultimately, as recent events have shown, to the detriment of the churches themselves.
A case from the late 1990s is instructive in illustrating the ability of a religious organization to keep the press at bay. Reporter Ralph Cipriano, formerly on staff at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was unsuccessful in persuading his editors at that paper to publish a full-scale account of evidence he had gathered about Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua’s questionable use of funds. Such editorial reticence at a newspaper where enterprise reporting had garnered eighteen Pulitzer Prizes was surprising. But Cipriano previously had written articles that evoked the cardinal’s ire, and Bevilacqua had lambasted him publicly, charging him with anti-Catholic bias. Even though Cipriano was removed from the religion beat, he maintained an interest in the cardinal’s leadership. When, acting on a tip, Cipriano began to investigate Bevilacqua’s spending, leading to the article his editors rejected, Cipriano said Bevilacqua’s attacks on him were renewed. According to Cipriano, a high-powered public relations firm retained by the archdiocese threatened to mount a campaign against him and the Inquirer unless the investigation was halted.
The National Catholic Reporter published Cipriano’s carefully documented account in full, but the impact was far less than if the story had been published by a major daily in Philadelphia.8 Subsequently, Cipriano lost his job at the Inquirer but won millions of dollars in settlement of a libel suit against his former editor, Robert Rosenthal, after Rosenthal told the Washington Post that Cipriano could not be trusted to report fairly on the Catholic church.9 As this example illustrates, church leaders, like executives of big corporations, can buffer themselves from media exposure with the help of lawyers or public relations experts versed in manipulating the press.
(Pundit Mike Hoyt, however, pointed out in a column in the May-June issue of Columbia Journalism Review that such media manipulation efforts can backfire. He recalled that when the Archdiocese of Boston was coming under intense scrutiny a decade ago for the serial sexual crimes of former priest James Porter, Cardinal Law had warned journalists to back off. “By all means, we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe,” Law had threatened. After Boston became the focus of national scandal this year, Hoyt countered the cardinal’s warning with one of his own. “Be careful what you pray for,” he admonished.)
GIVING BIG BUSINESS A BREAK
Just as editors may have found it hard to believe that Catholic leaders were engaged in a pattern of criminal cover-ups, it was apparently hard during the heady days of the 1990s for reporters to imagine that anything could have been wrong at Enron. By virtually all accounts, it was the nation’s most admired corporation. For a business press already caught in the spell of economic expansion, Enron amounted to a “secular religion,” Scott Sherman wrote in Columbia Journalism Review. As for the company’s top officials-who could imagine that they were exaggerating earnings while shifting risk to others from themselves?-the press bellied up, offering “pure hagiography,” Sherman alleged in his account of the press’s failure to spot the company’s duplicitous financial management. Inexplicably abandoning their watchdog role, business reporters instead touted Enron’s soaring success, never asking whether it might be illusory. “To excavate back issues of magazines like Forbes, Fortune, Worth, Business 2.0, and Red Herring is to enter a parallel universe of cheerleading and obsequiousness, a universe where applause obliterated skepticism,” Sherman asserted.
He quoted journalists who said they were duped, but Sherman insisted they shouldn’t have been, at least not for so long. Problems with the company’s financial statements were noted by a hedge-fund manager in late 2000. They might just as well have been picked up by a vigilant reporter. Sherman noted that the accounting problems prompted the fund manager, James Chanos, to short the stock, resulting in big financial gains for himself and his clients, before he tipped off a reporter.
In fact, according to Sherman, another reporter, acting on a tip, had discovered the problems on his own a couple of months before Chanos’s discovery. Jonathan Weil gave clear warning of trouble ahead in an article in the now-defunct Texas Journal, a regionally distributed section of the Wall Street Journal. In an analysis of Enron’s accounting practices, Weil wrote, “What many investors may not realize, is that much of these companies’ recent profits constitute unrealized noncash gains. Frequently, these profits depend on assumptions and estimates about future market factors, the details of which the companies do not provide, and which time may prove wrong.” Even more pointedly, Weil wrote, “Investors counting on these gains may be in for a jolt.” Yet his sobering report didn’t make it to the Journal’s national pages.
OFFERING READERS WHAT THEY WANT
The third situation where the press let down its guard, and perhaps ultimately the most devastating, was a widespread neglect of foreign news prior to the attacks of September 11. Michael Parks, in his analysis in the Columbia Journalism Review of editorial judgments that resulted in this disregard, asserted that news magazines had hesitated for years to put a foreign story on the cover, “knowing that it would likely mean a drop of twenty-five percent or more in newsstand sales.” As a result, he wrote, “most news organizations failed to cover what a substantial number of their readers and viewers believed was vitally important-the danger posed to the United States by global terrorism.”
Many news organizations have closed or consolidated foreign bureaus in recent years, particularly after the end of the Cold War. “After covering the Cold War for half a century, the emphasis was on local news, life-style stories,” based on a perception that that is what readers wanted, “and on higher rates of return for shareholders in capital markets made fiercely competitive by high-tech companies and dot-com start-ups,” according to Parks. Recent studies have documented a dramatic shift over the past two decades to increased coverage of entertainment and celebrities-cozying up to glamour and privilege to the detriment of the more difficult work of scrutinizing powerful institutions and their effects on social welfare.
Parks reported that Eason Jordan, chief news executive of the CNN News Group, expressed confidence that foreign coverage would continue after the network’s buyout by AOL Time Warner. “Our new leadership fully understands and supports world coverage,” Jordan said. “We have been told we will have all the resources we need.” But what will happen if a newly chastised public loses its appetite for foreign news again, if editors, readers, and television viewers return to their former complacency? Won’t news outlets, concerned about profits, once again give their audiences what they want?
Moreover, according to www.journalismjobs.com, a web site affiliated with the Columbia Journalism Review, some 50,000 journalists or business staff of news operations lost their jobs to layoffs as the economy slowed between Spring 2001 and Spring 2002. Is it any wonder that news organizations are unable or unwilling to devote the necessary resources to expensive foreign bureaus or to stories that require persistent investigation and risk being unpopular with readers? The buying and selling frenzy and the concomitant accumulation of debt has, in the view of many media experts, created a bottom-line mentality across the industry, resulting in budget and staff cuts that seriously impact the quantity and quality of news. Should we be surprised that, in an era in which big business enjoyed a higher rate of public approval than perhaps any time in history, a company like Enron might get an easy pass?
Raising a concern related to cutbacks in foreign news, Kunkel and Roberts pointed to dramatic cuts in numbers of reporters covering state and federal governments in recent years. The reason government reporters were reassigned? “Mostly it was because their editors, under financial pressure from their publishers and under industry pressure to do more expansive lifestyle coverage, allowed themselves to believe that readers found ‘incremental’ government news inherently boring.”
A MORAL FRAMEWORK AT RISK
Truth-telling and justice. Suspicion of privilege. Compassion and support for people who are poor and weak. Do the three major stories missed by the press fall into those categories?
Certainly the sordid drama of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy does. In many cases, victims suffered for years, often tormented by a misplaced sense of guilt. In the absence of the long-overdue public outrage that was eventually elicited by the press, many victims sought solace in alcohol and drugs. The most poignant of the stories recounted on behalf of eleven plaintiffs during the trial in Dallas was that of Jay, a gifted young artist who sought relief in suicide, leaving behind drawing pads filled with sketches of feet.10 The guilty priest, Rudolph Kos, now serving time in prison, began his molestation ritual by massaging the feet of his victims. Jay was represented by his parents at the trial.
In the case of Enron, reporters glorified what looked like success, apparently forgetting that their job was not to celebrate, but to keep a wary eye on executives, particularly those who appear to have a Midas touch. Meanwhile, rank and file workers, undoubtedly lured into false security by the press’s celebratory mood, were persuaded to sink their retirement funds into the company’s falsely inflated stock.
As for the September 11 attacks on the United States, it is highly controversial to suggest that Americans brought much of the anger on ourselves by our attitudes and actions in the Arab world. Expert opinions on perceptions of angry Muslims were reported largely after the fact: that Americans, while touting justice and equality, consume far more than their due and victimize poor countries with foreign policies crafted in the interest of that disproportionate need. Had the press not turned away from foreign news, Americans might at least have been forewarned that, in much of the Islamic world, the United States was increasingly targeted as a bitter enemy.
In each instance, though, getting at the stories would have required significant investigative work, entailing major commitments of budget and staff. Given economic cutbacks in recent years, journalists have had to be content with easier targets: the 0. J. Simpson trial, largely confined to a single courtroom; the murder of JonBenet Ramsey and the Clinton– Lewinsky scandal, both producing a barrage of articles driven as much by speculation as by fact.
One of our nation’s most precious resources is truth-telling. We depend on the publishing industry to help us recognize injustices and overcome oppression, to elicit our compassion for problems we might not otherwise see, to make sense of complexities and help us choose among alternative solutions. In short, we depend on the press to help us shape our understanding of the world. Yet, it should be clear from the cases cited that journalism’s moral framework is at risk.
I can recall numerous conversations with readers during my years as a reporter for the Post-Dispatch and the National Catholic Reporter when I was accused of writing, or the paper of publishing, controversial stories “just to sell papers.” Usually the complaining party was a miscreant, or a miscreant’s representative, called on to respond to an account of his or her offenses. Were I to have the same conversation with those readers now, I would tell them that the scenario in many newsrooms today is far more frightening: Papers, hungry for profits, desperate for reader approval, lacking resources, and fearful of reprisals, refrain from giving the public the information it needs.
ABSTRACT
Economic shifts in the field of journalism have eroded commitment to principles basic to the integrity of the profession, principles that are also at the heart of Christian ethics: truth-telling and justice, suspicion of privilege, compassion, and support for people who are poor and weak. This declining commitment is exemplified by three major stories missed or downplayed by the press in recent years-the scandal of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, the financial improprieties that underlay the downfall of Enron, and the threat to national security posed by the growth of radical Islam and other international forces fomenting anger against the United States.
1″Foreign News: What’s Next?” Columbia Journalism Review (Jan.-Feb. 2002), available online at www.cjr.org.
2Scott Sherman, “Enron: Uncovering the Uncovered Story,” Columbia Journalism Review (Mar.-Apr. 2002), available online at www.cjr.org.
3Carl M. Cannon, “The Priest Scandal,” American Journal Review (May 2002), available online at www.ajr.org.
4The committee’s mission statement and documents are available online at www. journalism.org.
5Gene Roberts, Thomas Kunkel, and Charles Layton, Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001). The quotation is from an excerpt of the book published in American Journalism Review (May 2001), available online at www.ajr.org.
6Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children (NEw York: Doubleday, 1992).
7″On Child Sex Abuse, When Will the Bishops Get It,” National Catholic Reporter (Aug. 5, 1997).
8Ralph Cipriano, “Lavish Spending in Archdiocese Skips Inner City,” National Catholic Reporter (June 19, 1998).
9See “Inky Ralphs Up Millions,” Philadelphia City Paper (Jan. 5, 2001). Other articles on the conflict between Cipriano and the Philadelphia Inquirer are available at http:// citypaper.net.
10Pamela Schaeffer, “Art Work Reveals Jay’s Suicidal Anguish,” National Catholic Reporter (Aug. 1, 1997).
Pamela Schaeffer, a journalist with twenty-five years’ experience and a four-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, has held reporting and editing positions for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Religion News Service, and the National Catholic Reporter. She holds a Ph.D. in historical theology from St. Louis University.
Copyright Theology Today Oct 2002
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