In the last issue of Catalyst, we did an article on how CBS has misreported a story regarding a 1962 Vatican document. William Donohue blew up at CBS when interviewed by Paula Zahn on CNN and asked league members to contact the network. Now we’ve learned that CBS has dug itself in deeper.
The Vatican document was a set of punitive guidelines aimed at stopping priests from soliciting sex in the confessional. CBS Evening News, however, twisted the story to make it seem like it was the beginning of a secret cover-up engineered by Rome. Following the Catholic League news release on this subject, Catholic radio talk show host Jeff Cavins also blasted CBS. Then CBS interviewed him for a story that purportedly would show why he was angry.
What CBS did, in fact, was to splice Cavins words to make it appear that he was angry at the Vatican. When Cavins protested to Andy Silvers, publicist for CBS, she asked him whether those who he spoke to about this issue were “devout Catholics.”
- This is the way a lot of the elite media think about Catholics: beware of the devout ones—they’re the rigid ones. It does not exaggerate to say that people like Silvers think of us as spooks. Maybe she should meet some of us once and a while—she may come to like us more than her lukewarm Catholic friends.
