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  LA Times Admits to False Reporting on Cardinal Mahony

By Dave Pierre
Newsbusters [Los Angeles CA]
June 15, 2007

http://newsbusters.org/node/13470

Check out the very first line from this June 7, 2007, article in the Los Angeles Times (emphasis mine):

    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.


Now check out this whopper of a correction from the Times on June 13, 2007 (emphasis mine again):

    For the Record

    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.


Wow. In other words, a central fact of the June 7 article, that Cardinal Mahony himself is being directly charged in this lawsuit for failing to protect parishioners from a pedophile, is completely false!

What is going on at the Times in its coverage of the church abuse scandal? It was only two-and-a-half months ago that the Archdiocese responded to two faulty articles that the Times had published in covering the scandal. (One of which contained faulty info regarding Cardinal Mahony. Read about that here.) (In addition, we have published here, here, here, here, here, here, and here about unfair, biased, and/or inaccurate reporting regarding Church issues.)

The Times staffer who authored the two faulty articles from March and the one we've mentioned here is a guy by the name of John Spano. In light of Spano's established record of misinformation, is it too much to recommend to the Times that they assign another reporter to this important story?

(By the way, in doing a Google search on Spano, I came across this interesting tidbit of information. It appears John Spano is married to a woman Episcopal rector, The Rev'd Susan Webster Klein. Feel free to discuss the relevance (if any) of this.)

  
 
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