What Is It With AP These Days?

Okay, a little lunchtime blogging due to a special situation going on today.

I don’t know what’s going on with the Associated Press these days. They seem congenitally unable to Get The Story Right.

TAKE THIS STORY, FOR INSTANCE.

It leads one to believe that Spain’s national conference of bishops has endorsed the idea that condoms should be used to help prevent the spread of AIDS. As a result, it has a lot of folks alarmed, wondering what’s up with that.

But here’s the deal: That article (on CNN’s web site) is an edited-down version of

THIS ARTICLE.

Or perhaps that one is an edited-up version of the one that CNN has.

Anyway . . .

The key sentence in the longer article is this:

Martinez Camino met the health minister as a representative of the church, though it was unclear whether he was expressing the official view of the church.

No, duh!!!

Listen: A person is Not Qualified To Be A Religion Reporter On Catholic Issues if he doesn’t know that something said by a single spokesman IS NOT AN OFFICIAL STATEMENT OF THE CHURCH. The only way policies get changed on the part of a national conference is if the conference as a whole takes a vote on it and issues a paper stating the policy change. Some offhand remark in front of the press by a spokesman of some kind does not a policy change make.

It doesn’t even matter if the spokesman is the president of the conference. The way Church law is structured, you have to have the whole conference take a vote or it isn’t policy. Think of it like Congress: It doesn’t matter what some senator’s aide says, or even what the president of the Senate says, unless Congress as a whole votes, it ain’t policy (or law).

Once again, the press gets it wrong.

Now, on a side note, if there really is an effort on the part of the Spanish bishops to change this then all I can say is los obispos son locos and we’ll have an interesting showdown with the Vatican.

UPDATE: THE VATICAN STRIKES BACK.

UPDATEUPDATE: SPAIN DENIES.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

14 thoughts on “What Is It With AP These Days?”

  1. Thanks for the update. The press gets it wrong, I am shocked, shocked that the press could ever get reporting on Catholicism wrong.
    By the way, you forgot completamente between son and locos

  2. I hate to think about these types of things, but two men engaged in a homosexual act wouldn’t increase the gravity of said sin by using a condom to protect againt disease, would they?
    Of course, condoms shouldn’t be advocated in any case, because the action itself is immoral. But in the case of homosexuality, it’s not the condoms that are immoral. Right?

  3. I read what I thought was an obviously truncated version of this story on Yahoo News this morning & I waited patiently because I knew someone would post the straight dope. Thanks, Jimmy.
    And, in a related subject . . . I was in a conversation re: contraception on Monday. One person said that the “historical” reason the Church has been against contraception is because it one time taught the “biological transmission” of original sin, meaning that the marital act was necessary in order for OS to be transferred from parents to their children. Has anyone ever heard of the term “biological transmission” before? I’ve not been able to find a thing. I checked all the usual sources: CCC, Catholic.com, New Advent, etc. I know what the Church has always taught but I’m just curious about this odd term.

  5. Jimmy,
    I enjoy your radio program on Catholic Answers here in Seattle. Recent convert. And a former AP reporter/editor. Maybe I can help ‘fill out’ some understanding?
    1) When I was with The AP, we didn’t write the headlines. AP is a wholesaler of the news to various outlets, and the outlets, typically newspapers, wrote the headlines as long as I was with AP. They may have changed that but the only way to know that is to see the actual raw feed from AP, which we don’t get to see as AP doesn’t publish the raw feed on their web site. When we see an AP story in a newspaper or web site, we’re seeing what that outlet’s group of editors decided what the headline should be. Example?
    Spain Catholics in condom U-turn at Google News
    Spain Church OKs condoms for AIDS at CNN.com
    Same story, different headlines.
    However, when I was there, AP did not have its APDigital service, which is sold to web sites and probably includes headlines. CNN is an AP member so it is unclear whether they are using APDigital service or their normal newswire feed (the one without headlines).
    2) News cycle issue. There is an AM cycle and a PM cycle in the newspaper business (I’m using Eastern timezone because that’s where AP’s world/national newswires are edited and distributed.) The “AM’s” cycle (in AP parlance) starts in the afternoon and for newspaper that publish the next morning. The PM’s cycle starts sometime early in the morning, and is for papers published in the afernoon. Notice that both stories have different Eastern timestamps. One was in the AMs cycle and the other PM. Now, it is almost a ‘law’ at The AP that the AM story and the PM story should not be word for word across more than one cycle, especially in the first several grafs. This suggests to me that AP first filed the original story on the wires in the PM cycle or morning Eastern and then did what is called an update as the day went on.
    3) Notice that the morning story has grafs 5 and 6 that are not in the afternoon story. And that the afternoon story as grafs 9 and 11 as adds not in the morning story.
    AP members are under no obligation to print every graf word for word. AP members also can add or delete grafs at their whim.
    4) Religion editor issue. When I was with AP, we had only several reporters dedicated to ‘Religion Reporting’. One based in NY (George Cornell) and the other at the Vatican. I find it most unlikely that AP has a dedicated religion reporter in Madrid but then again they may have added one. And, the majority of AP reporters are general assignment reporters rather than specialists such as a religion reporter. AP Radio, for example, has one religion specialist, Steve Coleman, and he does 2 two-minute stories a day.
    5) Who actually wrote the story, tho? Many AP outlets publish the name of the reporter writing the story. It is an AP ‘law’ that no reporter’s byline goes on a story unless the reporter was physically present. That is so AP member editors know the source of the story. When AP publishes a story without a byline, in most cases it is because AP has rewritten a story written by one of its newspaper, radio or TV members. But, I’ve seen CNN’s AP stories use the reporter’s byline so we don’t know for sure. The majority of AP’s reporter/editors take in stories from their members and rewrite them. AP members could not pay for AP services if AP had anywhere the local staff that local members have. Too much duplication. The number of reporters and editors just n the US runs in the tens of thousands at newspapers, radio and TV. Worldwide, AP staff is now at 3,700. When I was there, it was about 2,500. About 1200 reporters/editors and 200 fotogs worldwide and the rest support and technical staff. I suspect AP now has perhaps 800 reporter/editors in just the US.
    None of this significantly takes away what you said, of course. If we were to give the best reporter’s the benefit of the doubt, I learned their outlook is ‘progressive’ in the sense that a static event (no change) is not the stuff meriting a news story. Also, as part of our culture, their ingrained attitude is to highlight dissension and focus on change movements. The concept of unalterable Truth is very foreign to our culture, and reporters generally accentuate the distortions in our culture. So I am the Way, the Truth and the Life is seen as conditional, old fashioned, and subject to change. Is this not part of what Pascal meant when he discussed indifferentism in Pensees?
    Regards…

  6. It’s hard to trust the media concerning anything they report on religion. For example, they constantly describe JP II as a “conservative” or a “traditionalist” when he is neither. Or, they say that various conservative protestants are “fundamentalists” when they disagree with the central tenet of U.S. fundamentalism, dispensationalism.

  7. meaning that the marital act was necessary in order for OS to be transferred from parents to their children.
    Never heard of it in that context. I find that rather odd in that the marital act would be necessary not only to transmit OS, but to transmit children at all. It would make no sense to say that condoms were evil b/c they prevent transmission of OS, when you would not need OS if no one was being created. Abstinence and celibacy also prevented the transmission of OS, yet they were not considered immoral (quite the opposite).

  8. Catholic Answers has a pretty good sampling of the early church fathers on contracpetion. The objection to it is based upon the intentional thwarting of the procreative power of the act to separate it from the pleasurable/unitive aspect. I didn’t come across the “biological trnasmission” argument. Perhaps your friend has a citation to authority?

  9. It isn’t exactly clear whether or not the Magisterium, ordinary or extraordinary, has actually defined the fact that the use of condoms, outside of marriage, does anything to aggrivate the already-mortal sin of fornication. Or whether or not, by double-effect, an HIV-infected married man sins when using a condom with his wife. See:
    http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/register.cgi/tablet-00910
    and
    http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/register.cgi/tablet-00914
    Ciao.
    Eric

  11. Moochie.
    “biological transmission” of original sin sounds screwy to me. OS is the human condition – a fallen race. Reminds me of a question one of our catechumens asked at a meeting some months ago – she had been told by a no doubt well meaning woman in another group she attended, that a mother who had just recived Eucharist could pass on communion to her baby by breast feeding. Of course, Christ comes in the Eucharist in the form of bread and wine – “take and eat – take and drink”: not suckle from mum’s breast.
    I suppose that – in the sense that a life is created by sexual intercourse, but that is not the determinant of original sin. It would therefore folow that babies created by IVF would not be subject to original sin. Wrong.

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