If you were ever curious about how the Vatican is run and what all the different offices are, Catholic World Report had an article in the May issue that discusses the different offices and how they relate to one another. As the subtitle to the story says, it’s “a beginner’s guide to understanding the offices and activities of the world’s oldest government.” It’s the sort of thing you might want to print out and save for reference.
Seeing as you tried to access it at 1:00 am, it was probably during the time the server was being backed up.
As for your other point… whatever. I’m not sure what your point is and what one thing has to do with another. Oh right, now I remember: because we didn’t give more coverage to the canonization of your favorite saint, you think our coverage was flawed. Just to let you know: If you standin St. Peter’s square looking from the steps of the basilica down the Via Conciliazione, the first building to the left outside the square is the press office. That’s where our correspondents work. They were there.
A difference in emphasis in reporting is not the same thing as erroneous reporting. If the crowd was 200,000 and we said it was 20,000, that would have been wrong. But to give less mention to a saint who was popular among the Italian crowd than we did to a saint who was popular among the fewer Poles who made the trip all the way from Poland for that and the Pope’s birthday is just a difference in emphasis. That’s the news business: you can’t give everything equal time, so you use your judgment. That’s why there are a million news services and not just one.
And like I’ve said, the emphasis of the report is editorial perogative, it is not being unbalanced. If we had skewed the report based on ideology, bias, or prejudice that would be one thing, but we simply chose to emphasize the pope’s birthday over the canonization of another Italian saint. You think the canonization was more important. We thought the birthday and the Polish connection was more newsworthy. We made a decision that more of our readers would be more interested in what we covered than what you wanted us to cover. Simple as that.
As far as the typos, we try to be perfect, but we’re not and sometimes we miss something, but we correct it when we notice it. And as far as the nationality of the saint, our correspondent simply coped it down wrong. Since there are human beings involved in the process, occasionally they make mistakes. If you’re going to say we’re unreliable because of that, then there is no reliable news service out there because they all make mistakes.