Claims of hostile coverage of the Catholic Church by the New York Times will come as no surprise to GetReligion readers. Yet an unfavorable critique of the church is not always a sign of animus. When the press exposes cant, corruption and incompetence it is doing its job — no matter the field of inquiry. And then there is bad reporting.
A New York Times article entitled “Quiet for Years, Italian Church Blasts Behavior of the Nation’s Political Elite” falls under the later category. The article begins with an assertion, builds upon an assumption, and adopts a supercilious tone towards its subject. On a lesser level I find the syntax and sentence structure odd — as if it were written in Italian and then translated into English. There is nothing wrong with that in principle, but when the odd use of language distracts from the story this becomes a problem.
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