Catholic League president Bill Donohue released the following comment today:
The front-page article in [Monday’s] New York Times on New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was summarily ignored by the mainstream media. As I said yesterday in my release on the story, “No other newspaper in the nation would post a front-page story on a religious leader that led to nowhere, save for the Times.” Evidently, the media agreed. And to think that the Times spent a year looking for dirt, and all they got was dust.
We searched for news stories, and for television transcripts, accessing Google, Bing, Lexis-Nexis and Critical Mention, and found that aside from a few blogs, the media ignored the story. Even though the evening broadcast news uses the New York Times as a feeder, neither CBS, NBC or ABC picked up the Dolan story. Neither did the cable giants: the Fox News Network, CNN and MSNBC failed to report on it. That’s because they know a non-story when they see it.
There were two exceptions: KMOX radio in St. Louis, Archbishop Dolan’s home town, did an interview on the story, and so did Steve Malzberg on WOR in New York City. You can guess what was said—about Dolan and the Times—since I did them both.
Contact public editor Clark Hoyt: public@nytimes.com
