As Americans become more divided, more partisan, more angry at each other,
we more often charge that the press is biased. That may sometimes be true, but I keep on bumping into other reasons for inferior journalism, like ignorance.
Take this morning's AP story from Columbusa, Ga., headlined "Miltary School Site of Protest" on page 3 of the Albuquerque Journal.
Demonstrators, we learn, were protesting a US military school "whose graduates they claim later committed civil rights abuses including murder."
That was in the first paragraph. About six down, we learn that "SOA Watch and other critics allege the school's graduates have committed murder, rape and torture..." etc.
And so it goes. In this pretty long story, the reporter never tells us if the charges are true. Now that might be acceptable if we were dealing with crimes perpetrated yesterday.
But the School of the Americas (since renamed) goes way back. to the 70s, It was a huge story when in 1989, six Jesuit priests and two bystanders were murdered in El Salvador. My memory is, to put it kindly, vague, but I remember SOA being tied to the rapes of American-born nuns in Latin America, also a long time ago.
So how come we are still writing, 15 years later, "critics say" and "alleged."
Are the facts here unknown? Unknowable.
I wonder if the reporter tried to learn them. Did he Google SOA? Or read one of the many books on right-wing violence against Roman Catholic and other social reformers in Latin American dictatorships toward the end of the 20th Century?
Whatever the reason, this story is ignorant and a reminder that we live in the age of faith-based journalism. Faith, you remember, is what Aquinas - in his proof of God's existence - said we need to make a leap of. Yes, it replaces knowledge.
At least Aquinas tried to reason his way to God, using information and logic. Today's newspeople often don't make an effort to find the facts, no less the truth.