Bias? What Bias?

Learned Foot at Kool Aid report tripped upon an example of that non-existent bias from the media that is really conservative:

CBS news last night on its mini-broadcast wedged in between the 2 Final Four games (CBS finally figured out a way to get me to watch its news) Dick Roth reoported on the selection of a new pope (paraphrasing closely from memory):

With whom will the College of Cardinals replace this pope who ruled the Church with an iron fist? Will the choose someone like him or someone more moderate?

Not "many say ruled with an iron fist." Not "there were those among the (cardinals/cloth/laity) that felt the pope ruled with an iron fist". Merely "ruled the church with an iron fist".

And please describe "more moderate" for me. Should the cardinals elect a pope that will shed the Church's annoying and intrusive belief that a human fetus is exactly that: a human fetus?

The legacy of Dan Rather lives on.

It was interesting, listening to NPR's coverage of the death. If all you knew of the legacy of the Pope came from NPR, you'd think it was something like this:

1. No Gay Priests!
2.No female priests!
3. He quashed the liberation theologians
...
...
...143. Sparked the Solidarnosc uprising which led, eventually, to the fall of the Warsaw Pact and beyond that the USSR.
...
...
247. Helped end the Cold War.
...
...
638. Helped bring rapprochement between Catholicism and the Jews after centuries of bitter and sometimes horrible repression.

I'm not Catholic. My church has been admitting female ministers for at least a generation, and allowing its clergy to marry for centuries, and it hasn't hurt us theologically one jot (and the things that have hurt the Presbyterian church are not things to which American Catholics are immune), so I'm a little bumfuzzled by the Catholics' endless soul-wrenching over some of those issues.

And for that, perhaps, I can afford a more pollyannaish view of John Paul II's accomplishments.

So it's nice to be able to be a pollyanna.

Posted by Mitch at April 4, 2005 05:12 AM | TrackBack