Roman Catholic

NPR and the Darwinist Effort to Spin the Catholic Church.

NPR had a story Sunday by Jason De Rose on the Catholic Church’s position on evolution. The story was unbalanced, but it did report accurately, as some news outlets did not, that when Cardinal McCarrick of Washington spoke at the National Press Club last week he essentially backed up Cardinal Schoenborn. A theologian at Catholic University does the same in the story. On the other hand, the NPR piece takes the view that this is now an issue where the church is now opposed to “scientists.” It never occurs to De Rose to suggest that some scientists agree with the church and, if interviewed, would contend that Darwinists have been claiming more for their materialist philosophy than their science can justify by the evidence.

You’d think that after the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times would be exceptionally careful about questions of journalistic ethics. Why, then, is the Times allowing a reporter who regularly covers the evolution controversy on its news pages to ALSO write opinion articles on the same subject?

Cornelia Dean has written a number of news stories for the Times about the the controversy over evolution, including one about the Kansas science standards and another one last weekend about the Catholic church and evolution.

But the day after Dean’s news piece appeared about Catholics and evolution, a commentary by her promoting evolution appeared on the op-ed page of the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania! In this op-ed, Dean advised evolutionists about how they can win the public debate over evolution:

Today’s New York Times has a fascinating page-one article about Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent op-ed declaring that Darwinism is incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine as well as the findings of human reason. As we’ve come to expect from the major media, this “news” article contains errors of fact as well as editorializing by reporters Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, but it is nevertheless informative — and for a piece by the major media, relatively balanced. The article quotes both Bruce Chapman and Mark Ryland from Discovery Institute. The main thrust of the story is summarized early on in the following paragraphs: