i just sent this letter to the local paper, the burlington free press:
I found your decision to place a photo of Father Searles, a man who has never hurt anyone, above the headline "Priest-Abuse Trial Opens" highly offensive. It would have been much more appropriate and indicative of fair and balanced coverage if you had used a photo of the accuser or the Church's legal counsel. Your choice of photo creates a guilt by association effect on an innocent man. I have also noticed that from the very outset of the Church's abuse scandal, your paper has carried a highly anti-Catholic bias in its coverage. One wonders if the hate mongering of "reporters" like Sam Hemmingway could have had anything to do with the vandalism of the statue of the Blessed Virgin a short while ago. As a news organization you have a responsibility to your readers to provide fair, accurate and balanced coverage of the issues with out bias. With your coverage of the sex abuse scandal you have failed miserably in this regard.
not the best letter i could have written, but i was fuckin pissed. still am. im sick to death of how being anti-Catholic is the last acceptable prejudice. if you went after jews the way people go after the Church, youd be labeled anti-semitic and a nazi... but somehow its ok to target your hatred at us. yeah, the church has made mistakes, so has every organization on earth. get over it. and as far as the sex abuse scandal itself goes, 90% of cases were between a priest and a "youth" over the age of choice, many "victims" were 18 and 19 years old. sorry folks, but thats jus homosexuality, not pedophilia (pedophilia being sexual attraction to prepubescent youth). its also interesting to note that the scandal as a whole involved only 3% of priests in the US. the national average of actual pedophilistic abuse for all professions is 5%. thats right. your huge scandal actually amounts to jack shit. the ONLY reason such a big deal was made out of it was the fact that it was the Church. why? because the fucking morons of this country have some irrational hatred of the Catholic Church. all you dipshits who hate the Catholic Church have no valid reason for that hatred, and show nothing but your own stupidity when you attack it.
