Shot in the Dark

One Day In A Major Newsroom

SCENE: A group of reporters and an editor are sitting around a conference table.

EDITOR: OK. We need a story. Something to break us out of the summer doldrums.

REPORTER 1: We spent such a long time reporting on abuse of children in the Catholic Church…

REPORTER 2: I know, right? It’d be great to find another story like that.

REPORTER 3: Wonder if there’s another story out there like that…?

EDITOR: I have no idea.

REPORTER 4: Hey, look at this:

EDITOR: Did I stutter? I said – I have no idea.

And SCENE

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Mitch Berg

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11 responses to “One Day In A Major Newsroom”

  1. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Well, if you consider 1 priest is worth about 10,000 teachers, they have a loooong way to go.

  2. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    ^ What an odd thing to write. Where does that ratio come from?

  3. Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis

    The government doesn’t force anyone to pay a church tax, but everyone pays a school tax.
    And then they give the public school teachers union protection, and the teachers sic the FBI on any parents who complain about the teachers talking to their kids about sex.
    It is ironic — when I was a kid, a teacher could be fired if he or she was openly homosexual. That was pure bigotry, said the gay activists at the time, caused by the false belief that gays would recruit kids into being gay.
    This because “the science” said that sexual ID was fixed from birth.
    What’s the score on common sense versus elite beliefs these days? A million to one?

  4. Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis

    10,000 times as many public school teachers as Catholic priests?

  5. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    For reference, there are about four million teachers, so 350 being convicted of sexual misconduct with children is actually fairly low.

  6. Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis

    BB, there is good reason to believe that the numbers reported in the Fox report are low ball.
    There is no reason to believe that more pedophiles are attracted to the priesthood than to become public school teachers. Quite the opposite.
    But there is a media market for stories that claim that the Catholic Church is full of pedophiles, and that the reason is corruption of the all-male Catholic priesthood. There is no similar media market stories alleging that the public school system is a pedo-protection racket. So if you look up stories about that sort of thing happening in public schools, you have to search piecemeal info for each district. No journalist is reporting on pedos in the US public school system overall, but you can do a google search on the topic for the LA unified school district (admittedly the larges in the US) for a snapshot of the problem.
    And, again, there is a difference in the character of the institutional response of the institutions. The Catholic Church has initiated various reforms to address its problems in this area. Have you ever heard of any similar efforts in the public school system?

  7. Pig Bodine Avatar
    Pig Bodine

    jdm
    Clinton’s Dept of ED did a study that was published and buried in 2001or 2002 that detailed the level of sexual assault/harassment of children in public schools by staff and educators, their study concluded that over 10k of students are affected every year

  8. Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis

    BTW, I tried to look up some CDC numbers on this topic, and discovered that the CDC’s web pages on boys vs girls are being converted from blue and pink color schemes to green and yellow. Exactly what the green and yellow colors refer to is not mentioned.
    It is year zero, my friends.

  9. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    So Randi Wiengarten was arrested 350 times?

    Why am I not surprised?

  10. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Pig, good info. I know, for a fact, that a music teacher where I went to high school was quite the (fresh, young, nubile, good looking but not too much) lady’s man. You know, amongst those who were taking his band class. That went on year after year until suddenly it didn’t and then that music teacher was gone. Was never a official judicial system statistic but everyone knew.

  11. TKS Avatar
    TKS

    jdm, I find it incredibly ironic when someone mentions how priests were moved around to avoid being caught doing what they did. Yet when districts do it with teachers no one bats an eye. Just happened recently in VA.

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