Still, in the absence of a transcript—or an A/V recording of the remarks—who knows?Thus far we’ve looked at how Cardinal Schonborn’s reported comments might be more reasonably explained. But it should by no means go without notice that Cardinal Schonborn has said and done things in the past that are, at a minimum, quite eye-opening (here is his
Wikipedia page, with the understood limitations of such pages).
So I don’t want to give anybody a free pass regarding this story. There could be press misreporting, there could be misstatements or problematic statements by Cardinal Schonborn, or both.
The problem is: We can’t tell what the situation is.
Thus, for the moment, the whole things goes under the heading of “Media Fail.”
The media has not done its basic job of reporting the facts in a clear and reliable way.
It may have been true, back in the days of the dead-tree/broadcast-only press, that because of economic considerations the media was constrained by word count and air time and that it could only present us with summaries of what newsmakers said,
forcing us to rely on their reporters’ fairness and accuracy in composing summaries—but those days are GONE.
There is no longer a rational constraint on the ability of news agencies to provide us with transcripts, or at least audio or visual recordings, of what newsmakers say—complete and thus in context.
And if the press isn’t doing its job in this respect, newsmakers should
bring their own recording equipment.
It’s not like it’s hard. A bunch of iPhone apps exist for this purpose.
But with this story we have a Media Fail, with The Tablet and other news sources not linking to the original transcript/recording that we need.
Exactly!
