UNITED STATES
GetReligion
Terry Mattingly
It is, without a doubt, one of the most frustrating, infuriating things that can happen to a reporter.
You write your story. You are extra careful – since it’s on an emotional topic full of fact-claims that are in dispute – to make sure that you have included several qualified voices offering competing points of view. You make sure your story is the length assigned by the editors.
You turn the story in. Then, when it comes out (this happens A LOT in ink-on-paper news) you see that the copy desk has – for some reason, often page layout – basically cut the story nearly in half. To make matters worse, the editors didn’t thin the story in a way that left the balanced structure intact. They just chopped off the end.
Some of your sources are furious. They accuse you of bias, because the story is so one-sided. They have no way to know that the printed story is not the story that you wrote.
I bring this up because I saw an Associated Press story the other day – with a Vatican dateline – that had me really shaking my head. It had, I thought, all kinds of problems in terms of balance and essential information. It didn’t help that this was on a very controversial topic, one cutting against the grain of most reporting about Pope Francis. The lede:
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope’s own advisers question.
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