[cripplecreek]

I'm not real clear on Spanish history but I thought the Spanish inqusition was much longer ago than that.

[wagglebee]

This is along the lines of Walter Duranty when he wrote articles for the NYT where he completely lied about Stalin's genocide.

The leftist media just decides what they want the truth to be and that's what they write about, facts are irrelevant to them.

[Publius6961]

History BUMP!

[siunevada]

Lisbon, a busy sea port, was teeming with Spanish, French, German and British visitors on that fateful day, so the number of first-hand, eye-witness accounts from survivors of the disaster, is considerable.

Yeah, but ignorant priests hanging random heretics to propitiate an angry Sky God is so much more juicy.

That was way back in 1755. People just barely had brains. Not like us modern sophisticates. It's a good thing we have the WaPo to give us the facts.

[AnAmericanMother]

Any answer from Vargas?

Any retraction from the WaPo?

(I'm not holding my breath here, but I am curious.)

[NYer]

Ping!

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

I took a look at the original Washington Post article by Vargas. He has embedded this sentence about priests roaming the streets hanging people in a paragraph summarizing his interview with Martin Marty about Marty's new book, When Faiths Collide. It looks for all the world like Vargas is saying that Marty said this. If you read very carefully, you can see that strictly speaking it could be Vargas's own words inserted here and that apparently is what happened. But he snuck it in on Marty's coattails to give it even more apparent authority. WHen Vargas was fingered by Carpinelli, he said that he took it from the web and had planned to ask Marty to vet it and really thought that he had indeed raised it with Marty.

Carpinelli points out in installment two that most of the websites that Vargas gave as his sources themselves snaked their way back to Wikipedia, so that Wikipedia ends up being not merely on of his sources but probably the basic source for most of the instances in which the false story appears on the web.

[bornacatholic]

OL' George ought to stick with baseball. The Wanderer stopped publishing his column years ago after he acccused the Church and Pope Pius with cooperating with Hitler. Will is clearly an antiCatholic bigot.

Worse, He is BORING AS HELL!!! My daughter graduated from Boston University and he, unfortunately, was the Commencement Speaker. He began by noting the high temeratures (we were sitting on the football field at BU) and promised to give a short addresss. He droned on endlessly. We folks siting there began mocking him just to amuse ourselves.