CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: New York Times hits new low with mortifying Notre Dame correction  Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:53 pm | |
| Just in time for Easter, The New York Times has been forced to run yet another correction that speaks to the paper’s profound ignorance regarding the basic beliefs of Christianity.
In a Thursday report on the fire at Notre Dame, The Times highlighted the actions of Father Jean-Marc Fournier, the Paris Fire Department chaplain who exposed himself to certain danger in order to recover the cathedral’s treasured relics.
“I had two priorities: to save the crown of thorns and a statue of Jesus,” the Grey Lady quoted him. The story was full of gripping details about the scramble to preserve this statue. “As the chaplain began removing a statue of Jesus, he said, his colleagues were fighting the fire from the cathedral’s towers,” the paper reported. “With the statue in hand, Father Fournier, alone in the nave, gave a benediction to the cathedral, he said.”
There’s one small problem here. There’s no statue of Jesus inside Notre Dame. What Father Fournier was referring to was the Blessed Sacrament, communion bread that, according to Catholic doctrine, contains the real presence of Jesus Christ.
Sure enough, The New York Times later appended this correction to the story: “An earlier version of this article misidentified one of two objects recovered from Notre-Dame by the Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier. It was the Blessed Sacrament, not a statue of Jesus.”
How could the newspaper possibly confuse these two things? The most logical explanation is that Father Fournier referred to the “body of Christ,” and the reporter took his words literally and not seriously. It doesn’t appear to be a translation error; the reporter who wrote the story, Elian Peltier, appears to be fluent in French and tweets in the language regularly.
Of course, embarrassing as Peltier’s gaffe might be, it’s hard to top this correction the venerable paper ran in 2013: “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.”
A reporter for the paper had apparently confused the resurrection with the ascension into heaven.
The following year, the paper once again botched the resurrection in an article on Israeli tourism. “Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty,” observed the Times.
Again, the whole point of the resurrection is that Jesus rose from his tomb. He isn’t buried anywhere.
Other legendary Times mistakes are more amusing but still betray alarming ignorance. In 2005, the Times’ international edition ran a story on the funeral of Pope John Paul II that noted: “Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow’s ear, that he had carried in public.” The word for the ceremonial staff carried by a bishop is crosier (sometimes spelled “crozier”) and not a “crow’s ear.”
Do crows even have anything resembling ears? Fourteen years later, that error remains uncorrected.
In 2014, there was this doozy of a correction in an article about Mayor Bill de Blasio: “An earlier version of this article misquoted a comment from Malachy McCourt on St. Patrick. Mr. McCourt said, ‘My attitude is, St. Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland, and they all came here and they became conservatives.’ He did not say St. Patrick banished the slaves from Ireland.”
The paper knows it has a problem. In December 2016, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet conceded that no one in the liberal media saw President Trump’s victory coming, because they had no sense of what many voters thought.
One big blind spot was faith: “We don’t get religion. We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives,” he told NPR. “And I think we can do much, much better.” It’s a nice sentiment, but the recent Notre Dame gaffe and much of the paper’s coverage since has done nothing to convince voters that elite media are less ignorant of Christian values and beliefs.
https://nypost.com/2019/04/19/new-york-times-hits-new-low-with-mortifying-notre-dame-correction/
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