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Times Story Was Wrong From The Beginning
On June 13, the Times published this correction:
"Clergy abuse: An article in Thursday's California section about Cardinal Roger M. Mahony being ordered to testify in a lawsuit said the suit alleged that he failed to protect parishioners from Paul Kreutzer, a pedophile teacher. In fact, the suit accuses the Archdiocese of Los Angeles of failing to protect parishioners from abuse by Kreutzer between 1974 and 1976. Mahony did not become archbishop until September 1985 and is not named in the suit."
See another view of this botched story.
A story in the Los Angeles Times June 7 brings into focus two of the issues we've raised over the past several years regarding that newspaper's coverage of the Archdiocese: Accuracy and fairness.
The story should have been a fairly straight-forward bit of court reporting: A judge had ordered that Cardinal Mahony testify at the trial of a teacher accused of abusing students while at the same time ordering that the trial, which had been scheduled to start June 11, be delayed at the request of the Archdiocese's attorneys.
Instead, the story went wrong from the very beginning.
Here is the first paragraph of the Times story: "A judge Wednesday ordered Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to testify in a lawsuit alleging that he failed to protect parishioners from a pedophile teacher, but then granted the Los Angeles cleric's request for a trial delay."
In fact, the lawsuit does not allege any such thing about Cardinal Mahony. The alleged abuse upon which the lawsuit is based occurred from 1974 to 1976, but Cardinal Mahony did not become Archbishop of Los Angeles until 1985. What the lawsuit actually charges is that the church failed to protect parishioners.
Following this mistake, the story then allows Mary Grant, western regional director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests and a frequent Archdiocese critic, to charge that the request for a delay was "just another tactic… to keep the crimes covered up" and "a shame on the church."
Ms. Grant is, of course, entitled to that opinion. But what is peculiar here is that the Times chose to give her opinion prominence at the beginning of the story, but did not get around to explaining the reason for the delay until nearly the end of the story. (It was only a week before that the judge had raised the possibility that punitive damages could be involved in the case. Archdiocese attorneys argued that because of this new wrinkle, they needed additional time to prepare, and the judge agreed.)
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