VATICAN CITY
The Guardian – Greenslade Blog (United Kingdom)
Would you believe it? The Vatican has hired a Fox News journalist to be its senior communications adviser.
Greg Burke, the News Corp channel’s Rome correspondent, has covered the Vatican for Fox since 2001. He is a member of the conservative Opus Dei movement.
He becomes the Vatican’s first communications expert hired from outside the insular world of the Roman Catholic news media. He is not replacing the current spokesman, Federico Lombardi, but will advise officials on how to shape their message.
Some Vatican observers regard the move as a power play by media-savvy Americans — including Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York and the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — inside a Vatican hierarchy that is run by Italians.
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