Joanne McGarry, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, is confounded by the errors in reporting she has found throughout the print and broadcast media.
“There are things that get by the gate that probably shouldn’t,” McGarry said. “There are stories that should be second-guessed and the reporter should be called in and asked where is your verification for this.”
McGarry spends part of her day writing formal letters expressing concern to media outlets regarding Catholic-themed content that is inaccurate, contains inconsistencies or provides unfair representations. Recently, she has sent letters to the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and CBC concerning coverage.
“Generally I would say there is good and bad in all but I would also say that the Star and the CBC you can usually expect a few things that at the very least will give an incorrect impression even if they are not factually wrong, which in some cases they are that too,” said McGarry.
She also uses the league’s Facebook page to highlight errors, such as pointing to what was labelled as “negative, one-sided coverage” of the Pope’s resignation by CBC News.
With Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and the vast coverage it has brought in the secular media, McGarry has been busy. She said about 20 per cent of general news coverage, and almost half of all columns and opinion pieces, contain basic factual errors or misrepresentation of facts, if not both.
“One that’s come out the most is the critical evaluations of the papacy (and the) contention that Benedict did nothing about the abuse scandal,” said McGarry. “It might be fair to say that he could have done more but to say that he did nothing is really untrue and needlessly provocative. In fact, he had done more than those who had gone before him.”
Another major inaccuracy McGarry notes is the assertion that Benedict was a Nazi. While it is true he was a member of the Hitler Youth, a requirement for all German youth during the Nazi reign, Benedict and his family opposed the Nazis, which is rarely reported.
Ignorance is a likely cause of many of the errors. McGarry can sympathize with reporters who are expected to be an expert on everything, but says it is a mistake to treat these errors lightly. Mistakes, even minor ones, can create false perceptions. McGarry is also concerned about unbalanced reporting, which omits key facts, perhaps intentionally, to leave readers with misguided overall impressions.
But selecting which facts to include in a story is the essence of journalism, said a Ryerson journalism professor.
“Intentionally choosing facts to present, I mean that’s journalism,” said Joyce Smith. “Reporters can’t put in everything about everything in every story or we’d have book-long stories.”
Smith, who has spent almost two decades researching religious reporting in secular media, said that it must be realized that balance means something different in a newsroom.
“I can imagine that there are some people who feel that some of these stories aren’t particularly balanced but we again have to look at the nature of journalism. Journalism isn’t about reporting sort of everyday things,” said Smith. “It’s finding the things that are unusual, the things that are new, the things that are newsworthy.”
McGarry intends to keep speaking out when she feels reporters are wrong.
“The real danger is people who are only getting their information (from the secular media) are going to be getting a lot of inaccuracy and they might think things are true when they are not,” said McGarry.
“If you were relying on the (secular) media for your information about the Church you would be badly ill-informed.”
