Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell has a long history of downplaying and deflecting from the history of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. He does it again in his Jan. 20 column with Tim Graham, in which he complains about what he considers insufficient coverage of a female teacher who had an affair with a 13-year-old student:
One could guess that reverse sexism plays a role: An adult woman abusing a boy seems more acceptable than a grown man molesting a young girl. One could also guess that adding an abortion to the sinister plot made it less interesting to liberal journalists.
These are the same networks that will not stop covering and lecturing about the child sexual abuse — real and alleged and untrue — by Catholic priests, even after the church created new systems to vet not only priests but also even church volunteers who deal with children in parish life.
How about newspapers? The New York Times never loses interest in advocating against the Catholic Church on this issue. But on Alexandria Vera in Houston? Nothing. The Washington Psot, whose editor Marty Baron was painted as a crusading captain of the church-busting team at the Boston Globe in the Oscar-winning movie "Spotlight"? It never made the actual paper but drew two blog posts over the last six months that barely surpassed 1,000 words between them.[...]
Child sexual abuse in secular schools doesn't seem to inspire liberal journalists, which underlines that on this absorbing subject, as on many others, what's "news" depends on perspective, and in the American media, it is both liberal and libertine.
Bozell and Graham ignore the key difference in these cases. The above case he cites -- as well as the Mary Kay Letourneau case -- are isolated, independent cases and are not representative of a larger pattern.
By contrast, the Catholic abuse cases were marked by systematic cover-ups in which diocesean officials tended to move offenders from one parish to another, covered up the abuse and didn't admit the abuse to parishoners until decades after the fact.
In November 2015, Graham railed against the film "Spotlight," which is based on how systematic cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic diocese of Boston was uncovered by reporters, whining abaout "contrary facts" the film omitted.
By contrast to Bozell and Graham's sensitivity about the mere mention of Catholic sex abuse scandals, the MRC has a weird fixation on Chappaquiddick even though that was more than half a century ago.
