A couple of weeks ago, Jimmy blogged on an article in the Daily Mail reporting on a Vatican Radio interview with Fr. Gabriele Amorth.
A few days later, content from that Daily Mail article cropped up in an incredibly garbled form in a Sydney Morning Herald article by one Linda Morris, credited as "Religious Affairs Writer."
I don’t know how you get to be "Religious Affairs Writer" for the Sydney Morning Herald, but based on this piece, if I lived in Sydney, I’d consider getting my religion news from a more reliable source. Like the National Enquirer.
Here’s how the article starts out:
Devil in the detail: Vatican exorcises Harry Potter
THE Vatican has never been a fan of Harry Potter, but its chief exorcist has gone one step further and condemned J. K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard as downright evil.
"Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil," says Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s "caster-out of demons".
The books contained numerous positive references to the satanic art, falsely drawing a distinction between black and white magic, he told the Daily Mail in London. In the same interview, Father Amorth said he was convinced that Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were possessed by the devil.
Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence.
Now… how many problems can YOU spot in those few short paragraphs?
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Source problems. The article claims to be reporting on an interview with Fr. Amorth given to "the Daily Mail in London." False. In fact, that article was reporting on an interview given with Vatican Radio. Fr. Amorth was apparently not interviewed by the Daily Mail.
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Furthermore, even in the Daily Mail piece the Harry Potter business is only tacked on the end as something that Fr. Amorth has said "in the past." So even the Daily Mail wasn’t reporting on recent comments made by Fr. Amorth. The Daily Mail doesn’t even source the "past comments" in question — and then the current story linked above misattributes the Daily Mail‘s unsourced comments to a non-existent interview with the Daily Mail itself — specifically stating that the comments were given "in the same interview," which they weren’t! Just goes to show how carefully the reporter read the piece she was regurgitating.
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The article calls Fr. Amorth the "chief exorcist" of "the Vatican" as well as "the Pope’s ‘caster-out of demons’" (the latter phrase apparently lifted straight from the Daily Mail story). Jimmy has already pointed out the problems with these assertions.
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Given that (as Jimmy points out in the above link) Fr. Amorth is a priest of the diocese of Rome rather than an official of Vatican City, the various references to "the Vatican" are even more misleading than such media statements typically are.
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"Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence." Since Cardinal Ratzinger was elected to the Roman See in mid-April, that would put the alleged comments within the first 3½ months of 2005. In fact, though, this statement represents a garbled report about a letter Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in March of 2003 — two years before he is supposed to have made the comments in question. Again, Jimmy has the clarification. Suffice to say, it is not at all clear that Ratzinger ever described Harry Potter as a "potentially corrupting influence," either last year or in 2003.
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The article paraphrases Fr. Amorth as saying that "The books contained [sic; the books still exist!] numerous positive references to the satanic art." As phrased, this suggests that Fr. Amorth attributed to Rowling positive references to "the satanic art" as such, when in fact satanism is perhaps never mentioned in any of the HP books. The paraphrase in the original article is slightly more convincing: "Rowling’s books contain innumerable positive references to magic, ‘the satanic art’." That makes more sense: The books refer positively to magic, which Fr. Amorth calls "the satanic art." That’s different from saying that the books "contain numerous positive references to the satanic art."
"Devil in the details," indeed!
I have to say, I’m sick to death of the news media reporting that "the Vatican" has done this or that every time someone sneezes in Italian.
This piece, though, is even more egregious than usual. Did the reporter even bother to read her source piece twice — let alone actually check a single fact?
Sydney residents, demand more from your local media!
