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Leftist Media: Pope Getting 'Reagan Treatment'
NewsMax ^ | 4/6/05 | Carl Limbacher

Posted on 04/06/2005 12:41:17 PM PDT by wagglebee

The late Pope John Paul II is allegedly getting the so-called "Reagan treatment" and the liberal media do not like it any more than they liked Ronald Reagan.

"Many critics argue that the media are doing now what they did when former President Ronald Reagan died in June: reducing a deeply controversial figure to a warm, grandfatherly caricature," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

One critic peddled the current - and dubious - media line that the pope was out step with members of the Church in the West.

"This is a church with declining priests, with declining nuns, with declining church attendance," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Inquirer. "This was a very conservative pope. Most of his Western flock was not with his program."

Like the overwhelming number of her mainstream media colleagues, Miss Jamieson failed to understand that the program she mentioned was not John Paul's but the 2,000-year-old dogma of the Roman Catholic Church that he or any other pope is powerless to change.

Another popular media fiction is that the pope was a "polarizing" figure who created needless divisions within the Roman Catholic Church - a notion that avoids recognition of the fact that the alleged polarization arose from his defending what his church defines as good against that which it declares to be evil.

Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, a Web magazine about media coverage of religion funded by New York University's department of journalism and its Center for Religion and Media, adopted that line of attack.

"The reason we're getting sick of thinking about it is because this complicated story line is being reduced to a shallower level even than Ronald Reagan," he said. "The Pope was a figure of tremendous polarization. ... Now people are being asked to turn on a dime and consider him ... a mythic figure who had a simple and straightforward meaning."

Christopher Winner of United Press International, who the Inquirer noted covered both papal deaths in 1978, says the pope has been transformed in death into another one-dimensional cult celebrity. "The coverage to me is extremely manipulative. It's Hollywood coverage - it's celebrity coverage. It's uncritical. ... I'm not suggesting that he wasn't a remarkable figure - he was. But this is completely out of proportion."

Stewart Stehlin, described by the Inquirer as an NYU history professor familiar with the Vatican, disagrees that coverage has been uncritical and notes there is a natural tendency to speak well of the dead.

"I've read an awful lot where they would be laudatory but then say, well, he hasn't accomplished this, he was too strict on that. ... I would expect in a situation like this that most comments would be laudatory."

To the leftist media elite (who view Ronald Reagan - who, with the pope, brought Communism tumbling down - as an amiable dunce), John Paul is likely seen as a cranky old conservative wedded to outmoded doctrines who stood in the way of what they regard as human progress.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: coldwar; communism; johnpaulii; leftistmedia; mediabias; pope; popejohnpaulii; ronaldreagan
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To: wagglebee
The late Pope John Paul II is allegedly getting the so-called "Reagan treatment" and the liberal media do not like it any more than they liked Ronald Reagan.

From a Protestant view point...I say...NEENER NEENER NEEEEEEEENER.

21 posted on 04/06/2005 1:02:49 PM PDT by Brad’s Gramma (aitch tee tee pea colon 2 slashes dubya dubya dubya dot proud patriots dot org)
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To: AKSurprise

You say ... In my opinion people should change for their religion and its beliefs...

... and after all, isn't that exactly what Christ asks of us? To change, to strive for the good? To struggle against sin? There are forces out there who would rather alter the definition of sin, or just eradicate the idea entirely - that's the cheap and dirty way to redemption. The worries over the activist judiciary are the same thing: we can't alter the world through the electorate, so we will accomplish it by fiat.


22 posted on 04/06/2005 1:04:11 PM PDT by C2ShiningC
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To: TASMANIANRED

how come JFK wasn't "controversial"?


23 posted on 04/06/2005 1:04:14 PM PDT by dangus
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To: Brad's Gramma

The MSM hates it when they're not writing the story.


24 posted on 04/06/2005 1:05:57 PM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks
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To: wagglebee

The left hates anyone who is anti-Communist, and the Pope and Reagan were key figures in fighting Communism.

The left will never be critical of Castro when he dies.

(And some of the leftist media are p*ssed that they didn't get a free trip to Rome out of this!)


25 posted on 04/06/2005 1:07:17 PM PDT by LibFreeOrDie (L'chaim!)
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To: wagglebee
"The coverage to me is extremely manipulative. It's Hollywood coverage - it's celebrity coverage. It's uncritical. ... I'm not suggesting that he wasn't a remarkable figure - he was. But this is completely out of proportion."

As opposed to the Michael Jackson coverage?

26 posted on 04/06/2005 1:08:53 PM PDT by A Ruckus of Dogs
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To: wagglebee

The media has an abundance of compassion and deference to dead people.

While they are alive though, they're the ones yelling loudest, "Crucify him," or "pull their plug." I guess that is their attempt to assuage their liberal guilt at always being on the wrong side of moral issues.


27 posted on 04/06/2005 1:14:24 PM PDT by MikeHu
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To: wagglebee
I think another reason why they hate it so much is it is affirmation of the feelings of the majority of the American people. And the fact that they do not agree with the Democrats and their liberal agendas.

To quote Howard Dean this week:
Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean who has said he "hates Republicans and all that they stand for," may now be suggesting a reason for his feelings. Appearing on liberal Air America radio in Minnesota, Dean said Republicans are "mean. They are not nice people. They want to run nearly every aspect of your life." Dean went on to say that the Democrats' failures in recent elections are merely the result of a national message problem, adding, "We know what we believe in but we have trouble articulating it."

I guess they are still in denial about the fact that is was not the way they articulated it, but what it was they were actually saying.
28 posted on 04/06/2005 1:31:36 PM PDT by stm
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To: stm

But in their dreams, they've given the greatest speeches mankind has never heard.


29 posted on 04/06/2005 1:34:32 PM PDT by MikeHu
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To: Puppage

Really. Don't most people go to amoral journalism professors for insight into religion?


30 posted on 04/06/2005 1:37:29 PM PDT by 3AngelaD
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To: MikeHu

But when the alarm clock went off it was the Republicans that ruled the day. And if they continue on the same path they are now it will be the same in 2006 and 2008. I just hope the American people will not permit themselves to be duped by the wolves in sheep's clothing as they try to "re-invent" themselves.


31 posted on 04/06/2005 1:38:45 PM PDT by stm
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To: dangus

I don't understand the question.


32 posted on 04/06/2005 1:49:49 PM PDT by TASMANIANRED (Rule # 4. When liberals have factual evidence that their position is wrong they ignore the evidence)
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To: wagglebee

Could it possibly be that the left MSM and the Western Catholics who so disagree with the teachings of the Church, that the Pope has faithfully upheld, are out of step?


33 posted on 04/06/2005 1:54:24 PM PDT by baseballmom
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To: Puppage

If his Western flock wasn't with his program, then why have unprecedented millions of ordinary people from all walks of life, many of then non-Catholics, flocked to Rome to pay their last respects to him? He and Ronald Reagan are now side by side in Heaven, having done the Lord's work of defeating Communism. Nothing can ever take that great accomplishment away from either man. Ronald Reagan was mourned as the Pope is being mourned becaue of each man's incalculable service to freedom and the Lord.


34 posted on 04/06/2005 1:58:36 PM PDT by libstripper
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To: wagglebee

The liberals are so upset about the supposed uncritical adulation for the pope, but when a liberal icon dies - a Susan Sontag or an Arthur Miller - we hear nothing but adulation about them. As for the pope, of course as he was dying the tone was respectful, as befits common decency, but as soon as he died there HAS been a lot of negativity about him in the press. But I saw NO negativy in the mainstream press about Sontag or Miller.


35 posted on 04/06/2005 1:59:08 PM PDT by Steve_Seattle
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To: mainepatsfan

But they will!


36 posted on 04/06/2005 1:59:28 PM PDT by libstripper
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To: Steve_Seattle

What about all of the nonsense when Hunter Thompson blew his brains out? And that guy NEVER did anything worthwhile. . . . And then there was all of the leftist grieving over the mass-murdering terrorist Arafat.


37 posted on 04/06/2005 2:01:04 PM PDT by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: stm

Thank heavens for Michael Moore and the DNC seating him beside Carter at their convention. It showed everybody what the DemonRats actually stand for.


38 posted on 04/06/2005 2:05:00 PM PDT by libstripper
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To: baseballmom

The left wants to make "conservative" equals "controversial" and thus leftist/liberal/"progressive"(ugh I hate that word usurp) equals NONcontroversial.

each nuanced article is just an effort to push the spin.

Imagine how baited breath the left is with B.Clinton to give him the reagan treatment. I bet Hitlary has a presidential campaign designed to run based on being a "clinton widow."


39 posted on 04/06/2005 2:13:31 PM PDT by longtermmemmory (VOTE!)
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To: Spktyr
And the turnout for President Reagan's funeral will be paltry compared to His Holiness. The last estimates I heard were 4 million people will show at St Peter's Basilica. That is the population of some small countries.
40 posted on 04/06/2005 2:23:30 PM PDT by stm
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