Archbishop Chaput: News Media Fails to Fulfill its Role

Once again, the articulate and eloquent Archbishop Chaput speaks very candidly and truthfully about one of the most crucial issues of our day -- the bias in the mainstream media.

Via CNA:

At a Wednesday evening gathering of the Catholic business group Legatus, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver analyzed the influence of the media upon American Catholics. The news media, he said, has the important role in our democracy of protecting truth and pursuing reason, but it is failing to deliver.

"America’s news media have enormous opinion-shaping power," Chaput explained. "Therefore it’s vital for Catholics to understand how the media work, and especially how they work on us."

"The media’s power to shape public thought is why it’s so vital for the rest of us to understand their human element."

Instead of some impersonal organization, Catholics need to realize that the men and women who report the news bring their own cultural and political views, economic pressures and social ambitions to their reporting and editorial decisions, the Denver archbishop said.

"When we don’t recognize the personal chemistry of the men and women who bring us our news … then we fail the media by holding them to too low a standard. We also –and much more importantly—fail ourselves by neglecting to think and act as intelligent citizens."

But the media also has "an obligation to the public," Archbishop Chaput stated, "a duty to illuminate public discourse by presenting the facts of a story in a full and truthful context, regardless of the intellectual fashions of the moment."

While he noted that while "many of the reporters I talk with try to be diligent and fair," the prelate lamented, "too many news professionals don’t live up to this standard. And some, quite candidly, don’t seem to try."

Read the entire article here.

He certainly hits the nail on the head!