Foley and the media

Last year, the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald both knew that Foley had had inappropriate communication with the 16-year-old page, but declined to write about it. According to CNN, the St. Pete Times says that when it contacted the kid, he wouldn't go on the record, so they dropped the investigation. This is not an excuse: CNN also reports that Brian Ross of ABC News, who got his hands on the same info that the Florida papers had, did some old-fashioned reporting and smoked Foley out.

People have asked me over the years why the media never reported on Cardinal X's well-known sexually abusive practices, or this, or that aspect of the Catholic scandal. Well, absent documents or knowledgeable sources willing to go on the record, there's nothing that a news organization can do. Part of what ate me alive for a couple of years was knowing about all kinds of heinous stories of clerical sex abuse, but not being able to report it because none of my sources would go public, there were no records (lawsuits, police reports, etc.), and other doors kept slamming. But I was only one reporter, working the story part-time for a small opinion magazine in New York. I wish I could have done more, and will always wonder what more I could have done had I been a reporter for a major newspaper or TV network.

I also wonder, following up on what I posted below, whether fear of homophobia played any part in the Florida papers lack of interest in the story. We'll probably never know, and it's not such a big deal anyway. Still, I can tell you from firsthand experience, and from talking to a liberal reporter who pulled no punches in covering the Catholic sex abuse story, that there was no small amount of concern among reporters that their work was going to end up causing people to think ill of homosexuals. So they pulled punches. I may have blogged here before about arriving at the 2002 Catholic Bishops Conference in Dallas -- the first one after the scandal broke -- and was shocked to be told by a major TV correspondent that the top brass of her news organization had told her to stay away from any homosexual angle in this story.

"But you can't tell the whole story unless you get into that part!" I said, dumbfounded.

She just shrugged.