New York Times Finds New Way to Slime Pope Benedict, by Jimmy Akin, National Catholic Register, July 31, 2010

New York Times Finds New Way to Slime Pope Benedict!

By Jimmy Akin
National Catholic Register
July 31, 2010

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/new_york_times_finds_new_way_to_slime_pope_benedict?utm_source=NCRegister.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b25254e1ae-RSS_DAILY_EMAIL

So remember how a few months ago the New York Times was piling on Pope Benedict, using a selection of documents that they misunderstood and misapplied to charge that in the 1990s Cardinal Ratzinger facilitated priestly paedophilia by not acting against priestly paedophiles?

Well, they’re at it again! And reporter Laurie Goodstein is back leading the charge with a new 4500-word attack piece on Pope Benedict.

How does the new slime job work?

It consists essentially in taking all of the facts that were known before and seeking to re-present them in the worst possible light. There is essentially no new reporting in the piece—no new massive revelations. Apparently Goodstein and her collaborators, David Halbfinger and Rachel Donadio, are relying on the reader not to remember that they read all this stuff three months ago so that it will come off as news. Failure to remember will also allow Goodstein and collaborators to re-shape the reader’s views by recasting already known events in a negative light, building up an impression of one negative thing after another.

Yet they’re trying to insulate themselves better than they did last time, when they were badly burned when it was pointed out that Cardinal Ratzinger, more than anybody else, was working to improve the Holy See’s response to abuse cases.

Their strategy this time out thus consists in acknowledging what they got burned about before and then applying a “yes, but” tactic over and over again. Thus the first two graphs of the story are the tacit recognition of the last attack job’s result:

In its long struggle to grapple with sexual abuse, the Vatican often cites as a major turning point the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly.

The decision, in an apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II, earned Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, a reputation as the Vatican insider who most clearly recognized the threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the Roman Catholic Church.

Then the third graph offers the rejoinder and signals the New York Times’ gambit to get back in play on this issue:

But church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.

The tone in the piece is unabashedly biased. Though it is not labelled an editorial or even “news analysis,” the piece over and over again employs evaluative, opinion-based language instead of straightforward reportage.

On a mechanical level