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Media Stopping the press
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
Two depressing facts hit the news
wires in early February: that the institutional Catholic church is still not an
open institution and that todays press has its eyes fixed more on
maximizing profits than on both informing and disturbing the public.
The case of the Philadelphia Inquirer versus its own
ex-reporter Ralph Cipriano versus Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua and the
Philadelphia archdiocese is back. Sounds complicated? Indeed it is. NCR
readers know part of it because the National Catholic Reporter, on June
19, 1998, published Ciprianos prize-winning investigative article on the
archdiocese, including embarrassing material that his own paper, the
Inquirer, had cut.
But today the case is hot again for three reasons:
- Ralph Cipriano sued the Inquirer for libel when his
editor, Robert J. Rosenthal (now the editor and executive vice president), told
Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz, There were things we
didnt publish that Ralph wrote that we didnt think were truthful.
He could never prove them. Joe Nicholson -- a Holy Cross graduate, a
former New York Post, New York Daily News and Associated Press
reporter, and occasional Commonweal contributor -- has chronicled
Ciprianos case for the Feb. 5 Editor & Publisher, the
industrys authoritative trade publication, and revealed that the
Inquirer has coughed up a reported $7 million to settle the
suit and has been cowed by the church and its public relations firm
into softening its coverage.
- In the February Philadelphia Magazine, writer Maximilian
Potter, a self-described lapsed Catholic, profiled Brian Tierney,
the high-powered local adman and publicist whose firm coached the archdiocese
on how to face down the Inquirer when Ciprianos investigations of
diocesan finances began to embarrass the cardinal. Tierney -- 75 percent of
whose clients are Republicans -- was hired to solve George W. Bushs
Catholic problem: He got the cardinal on stage at the Republican
Convention, sprinkled the crowd with dozens of priests and nuns, and rallied
over 100,000 new Catholic votes for Bush in Florida. Barnstorming for Bush,
Tierney bragged that the pope had named him a Knight of St. Gregory and implied
that Bushs policies, including his tax cut, matched those of the church.
- A Columbia Journalism Review survey (November/December
1999) ranked the Inquirer as the 11th-best paper in the country but had
to mention the exodus of top editors trained by Gene Roberts, who left to
become managing editor of the New York Times and now [is a
professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.]
Columbia Journalism Review asks: Has it lost its fire?
Today, some Inquirer staff members blame Ciprianos
single-minded abrasiveness for the papers troubles. Others are wondering
whether they are still free to fulfill the gospel of American journalism:
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They are not
alone. Across the country, the conglomerates that own newspapers are demanding
an unheard-of 15 percent to 20 percent profits for the stockholders. Word -- or
unspoken signals -- comes down from the boardroom: Dont make waves;
dont upset imagined opinion leaders, like businessmen or
cardinals, who might nip advertising or circulation.
Ciprianos troubles involve two periods: 1991-93, when, as
religion reporter, he profiled Bevilacqua and began investigating the
dioceses big expenditures on an elaborate video-conferencing center and
$200,000 to refurbish his beachfront summer residence in Ventnor, at a time
when the diocese was raising $100 million to save struggling parishes and
schools; and 1996-97, when, working on a new profile for the magazine, he
discovered, along with other financial problems, that the diocese had settled a
suit for $87,000 with a former employee who claimed the cardinal had been
rude and abusive toward him.
Upset at the direction Ciprianos investigation was taking,
Tierney staged three meetings with Inquirer editors, where, as is his
method, he does not dialogue but harangues his captive listeners non-stop,
employing slangy language like cool and dude, not
letting his listeners forget that, with his control of his clients
advertising budgets, he is one of the most powerful men in town.
According to Nicholsons report on Ciprianos legal
complaint, Tierney warned Cipriano and the editors he could ruin
them and said to Cipriano, We got rid of you once, and well do it
again. The Inquirers Jonathan Neumann, who was
Ciprianos supervisor, described Tierneys method as
insulting and demeaning. Phillip Dixon, currently
deputy managing editor, called it venomous.
Despite Ciprianos eight months of research, editors trimmed
the piece, which ran April 14, 1997, to 167 lines.
Rosenthal said later in deposition that his statement to the
Washington Post was directed not against Ciprianos written
material but his comments on the cardinals personal life. Bevilacqua told
Nicholson that he knew of no one investigating his personal life and had
nothing to hide.
But Bevilacqua set out immediately to put the Inquirer on
the defensive. First, in his newsletter, The Voice of Your
Shepherd, he called the story on his little used media center
fallacious and found it disturbing that the paper had
left Cipriano on the story in spite of their meetings. He would allow no news
organization, he said, to unjustly malign the Catholic church.
Second, he demanded that the Inquirer print his long
rebuttal in its entirety. In an internal memo, Neumann called Bevilacquas
letter false and libelous and warned against caving in.
The Inquirer printed it on May 19, 1997, but stood by Ciprianos
reporting as objective and ethical.
Perhaps it helps to look at it this way: There are two kinds of
reporters -- the retrievers and the bloodhounds. One brings back the story
content to merely depict the surface of a situation -- an earthquake, a fire, a
school closing -- without reference to the shabby construction that made the
buildings collapse, the building inspector who didnt make his rounds, the
financial mistakes or misplaced priorities that closed the school. This is
sometimes called, incorrectly, objective journalism.
The bloodhound smells something wrong, and the whiff of blood
quickens his senses. If he exposes the problem, someone will be embarrassed
enough to fix it. The bloodhounds dont all have warm fuzzy personalities,
but journalism could not fulfill its role as tribune, defender of
the weak, without them.
Cipriano went back to work, did more research, and offered his
9,000-word article to NCR. When it appeared, readers saw an enigmatic
cardinal, a masterful politician in front of a crowd, but an isolated,
sometimes rude administrator toward those who had to deal with him day by day;
a big spender -- embellishing his private mansion, his headquarters and summer
house -- with a history of poor money management; and a successful fundraiser
to save the schools, who immediately set about closing parishes and
schools, particularly in North Philadelphia, the poorest part of town.
Not a flattering portrait, but, ironically, the fall-out, the
long-range consequences of Bevilacquas attempt to stop the presses, has
done more harm to both the archdiocese and a great newspaper than any piece of
investigative journalism could accomplish.
Defending the Inquirer in a letter to Editor &
Publisher (Feb. 12), David OReilly, the current religion writer,
points to his own three-part 1999 series on the archdiocese, including the
parish closings, as comparable to anything your martyred saint, Ralph
Cipriano, ever produced and a worthier model of reporting to hold
up to young journalists than Ciprianos Holy Grail. (My
call to OReilly and request for a copy of the series got no response.)
Phillip Dixon, in a letter, said Editor & Publisher erred in
reporting the settlement at $7 million. It was nowhere near that
amount.
The Inquirer maintains that the Tierney offensive did not
stop the story or weaken their coverage. Yet, Bevilacqua himself told Editor
& Publisher, referring to the 1996-1997 meetings between
Inquirer editors and Tierney, He stopped the story. That was the
important thing. As a result, the cardinal now finds the Inquirer
very positive in their stories, much more than they have ever been,
even better than the archdioceses own paper, The Catholic
Standard and Times. The Inquirer even offered Bevilacqua a weekly
column.
Although former editor Gene Roberts told Editor &
Publisher that the church should be subject to the same scrutiny as any
institution, Tierney and the archdiocese, and it seems the current leadership
at the Inquirer, which has a renowned stable of investigative
journalists, disagree.
Meanwhile, the cardinal has his costly properties and his costly
victory, and Cipriano has a few million dollars -- and his professional
self-respect.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is the Jesuit community professor
of the humanities at St. Peters College in Jersey City, N.J. His e-mail
address is raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, March 2, 2001
[corrected March 30, 2001]
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