World News Korner

Sarah Palin apologizes concerning her remarks about the pope, blames the media. Update!

Here is what she said yesterday on her ghostwritten Facebook page:

Just to clarify my comment to Jake Tapper about Pope Francis, it was not my intention to be critical of Pope Francis. I was reminding viewers that we need to do our own homework on news subjects, and I hadn't done mine yet on the Pope's recent comments as reported by the media. Knowing full well how often the media mischaracterizes a person’s comments (especially a religious leader’s), I don’t trust them to get it right when it comes to reporting on the Vatican. I do, however, trust my many Catholic friends and family, including some excellent Catholic writers, who have since assured me that Pope Francis is as sincere and faithful a shepherd of his church as his two predecessors whom I admired. I apologize for not being clearer in my response, thus opening the door to critical media that does what it does best in ginning up controversy.

- Sarah Palin

So let me get this straight. Is it the media's fault for reporting what Pope Francis said, Palin's fault for not reading what the media reported, or the media's fault again for reporting accurately what SHE said to Tapper?

Well strike that middle one, because it is NEVER Palin's fault.

So let's see what the media reported about the Pope's remarks.

In September this is what the Pope said:

In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings. “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” the pope told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal whose content is routinely approved by the Vatican. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

Okay now the Catholic church did try to soften that language a little, and even reinterpreted it to some degree, but NOBODY claimed that the media lied or misrepresented his words to my knowledge.

Then in October, it was reported that the Pope said this:

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology,” he said, according to Radio Vatican. “And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid.

“And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

“The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people,” Francis added. “But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”

And again nobody claimed the media got the words wrong.

You know until Sarah Palin of course.

And this was what Palin said to Tapper that she now seems to believe was taken out of context:

"He's had some statements that to me sound kind of liberal, has taken me aback, has kind of surprised me," said Palin. But "unless I really dig deep into what his messaging is, and do my own homework, I’m not going to just trust what I hear in the media." (By the way the entire interview can be heard at the link, for the purposes of verification.)

You know, and I am sure this will shock all of you, it appears that when Palin suggests that the media has misrepresented something, what she actually means is that they reported it accurately.

Which means I assume that Jake Tapper, a man whose reporting she once singled out as accurate, now joins Katie Couric as a journalist who resorts to "gotcha questions."

How "lamestream" of him.

Update: By the way it should be noted that the reason that authors (In this case rich people who pay ghostwriters to write their books.) go on book tours and give interviews, is to stimulate book sales, but in Palin's case her book has been dropping like a stone, seeming to accelerate with every interview that she gives. When all of this first started I believe she was in the mid fifties of Amazon book sales. As of this post she is 135.



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