UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport
For the last several years now, TheMediaReport.com has provided hundreds of examples of the media’s biased and unbalanced coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse story. And, unfortunately, our weekly posts provide only a small glimmer of the overall problem.
But the purpose of this site is to arm responsible journalists with the facts about sex abuse so as to improve their coverage and hopefully lower the incidence of sex abuse in our society.
What can the mainstream media do to improve its reporting of the Catholic Church sex abuse narrative? Here are five suggestions:
1. Provide context
Contemporaneous accusations of abuse against Catholic priests are extremely rare, recently averaging in the United States only eight per year even deemed “credible” by diocesan review boards. Almost all accusations against Catholic priests involve allegations from decades ago. Yet you would hardly know this from the media coverage, which almost always makes it appear that abuse is still an ongoing and current problem in the Church.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.