Ladies and gentlemen, the front page of today’s Springfield News-Leader, delivered to me by accident instead of the Barron’s I normally receive on Monday:
Headline: Cardinal Law, portrayed as protector of pedophile priests, once worked here
“Once” meaning 31 years ago.
Apparently, nothing happened in Springfield this weekend other than the paper’s columnist going to the movies.
Either that, or the newspaper’s editors somehow thought that their readers would best be served by rehashing a decades-old connection to a decade-old scandal. Or perhaps the paper just wanted to get “pedophile priests” in big print on their front page, with their columnist going through the morgue–no, sorry, it’s the newspaper archive these days, so going through the morgue isn’t as much work as spinning through microfiche, it’s running a computer search–and blatting up a column on it instead of doing any actual investigation.
This is why I no longer take the Springfield News-Leader; this is why I don’t accept one of the free copies they’re giving away at little tables in the grocery store and in the warehouse club store; and this is why I am very disappointed when I get one for free by mistake in my driveway.
Because all I’ll get out of it is a bit of fist-clenching ranting about it, and that frightens my cats.
