1) The pope does a youth rally and 2 kids are stampeded to death, resulting in pictures of the Pontiff kissing kids on the cheek and making promises to visit the injured.
I use a news aggregating service called Newser. http://www.newser.com/ Aside from being a testimonial to how condensed information delivery and receipt has become, it is a barometer for what makes newsworthy content. I started using Newser as a kind of methadone for the news. It is a cute little widget that sits on my IGoogle front page and radically reduces the amount of space dedicated to national and world news. Now, I get all the news in tiny little snippets. A picture gallery with a one or two line description. I can click for a little more, or just take a pass. Usually I would take a pass on a picture of the Pope kissing babies. That’s an important part of the Pope gig. But the picture of the Pontiff kissing babies with a headline: ” Two teens die in Pope stampede” compels me to blog.
You have to wonder about the veracity of a news site that would sensationalize such a minor event in the big scope of things. When the Pope does a rally for 30,000 youth in Angola the fact that a couple of them were killed, and a few are hospitalized; isn’t this just the capital damage to be expected? Yes, I too wish there was a word in the English language that was larger or more potent then “facetious” to describe my last remark. Let’s call it uber-facetious. And yes, it was meant to be.
Realizing that a news service called “Newser” might lack the necessary journalistic credentials to warrant raising my hackles; I immediately went to the front page of the New York Times, a paper whose credibility is slightly less questionable. There I found a headline: ” Pope Tells Clergy in Angola to Work Against Belief in Witchcraft”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/world/africa/22pope.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
At the end of the very newsy article, replete with interviews and human rights angles, way down at the very bottom of the NYTimes page, was printed, as a tag to the very same article, almost like an afterthought:
2 Reported Killed in Stampede
LUANDA, Angola (AP) — The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that two people were trampled to death in a stampede at a sports stadium on Saturday, before Pope Benedict XVI addressed young people.
LUSA cited an unidentified source at a local hospital as saying a man and woman were dead on arrival. The agency said eight other people had been hospitalized with minor injuries.
It was almost like the author of the story didn’t include this little tidbit of information thinking it un-newsworthy. Then at the last minute a copy boy rushed up to his/her desk and gave them a tear sheet off the wire….2 reported killed in stampede.
WWJD? Our individual speculations on the answer to that question may vary. What I am pretty sure of, had the sermon on the mount resulted in the stampeding death of two innocents; he would have pledged to do a little more than visit the survivors in the hospital and give them each a magic decoder ring.
Here’s hoping that some Catholic passerby reads this posting and draws arms. Go for it. Please. Pretty please.