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It has been very hard, the past few days, to decide what waves in the ocean of Vatican coverage are worth surfing. We will continue to try to note some of the better sites collecting valuable links.
I think it was during a seminar at the Poynter Institute that I first heard a line drawn between “balance” in a news story and the concept of “false balance.”
Maura Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times reports today on President Bush’s plan to attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral, interpreting it as an effort to cultivate votes among Catholics:
My old boss at The American Spectator, Wlady Pleszczynski (pictured), gives us his take on the pope, and the view from Poland. The article, titled “Everyone’s Pope,” begins with the cheeky assertion that
I have not been able to read everything, but, so far, it seems that The Sunday Times has the most developed, lovely version of the final moments of Pope John Paul II, complete with lots of clear attributions for sources. Here is a major piece of this triple-byline feature, starting with the pope struggling to dictate a mesage to his secretary:
Here is a lovely little Associate Press feature about an element of the pope’s life that has been hard to imagine in the past decade or so of sickness and decline — John Paul II the athlete. The story also includes a reference to what may be the first miracle of his papacy: “He has been a terrific sportsman,” said George Weigel, author of a biography of John Paul. A key clip: “As a young man he was a very active soccer player, a skier, a hiker. As a young priest he became very involved in a ministry to university students built around hiking, skiing and kayaking. . . . The first 15 years of his pontificate he took breaks to go skiing, and the miracle about that was the Italian paparazzi actually left him alone.” Anyone see any good photos from this era?
The mainstream media are now working their way out of the hands-clutching-rosaries stage of their coverage, after a marathon of anchorpersons trying to project nonstop sympathy for the pope and those who loved him. Now we are transitioning into the serious coverage that will resemble the New Hampshire primary with vestments and incense (more on that later). The faux-political polls ought to start coming out any minute now.
Slate‘s JPII lineup is less than ideal. First we get two articles that ran in 2003 — one moderately interesting explanation of how the voting will go for the next pope and a piece by Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman that makes a lot of jokes without really handicapping the race for the next pope. Then we have a short, bloodless exchange between the “Catholic Right vs. the Catholic Left on John Paul II’s Legacy.” The partners in dialogue are Michael McGough and Deal Hudson. And — yes — Hudson does use much of his space to flak for Republicans. Christopher Hitchens weighs in with his usual drunken bombast, but this denunciation doesn’t even rise to the level of his attempt to pour cold water on Ronald Reagan. Rounding out the coverage is a summary of today’s newspapers and a piece by television critic Dana Stevens, who complains that network coverage is turning the pope’s “death agony into a peepshow,” which is “accompanied by blow by blow by perky newscasters.” Better, please.
