Diogenes reports on the case of Chuck Colbert, a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, who in March 2004 attended Mass at the parish I grew up in precisely to disrupt it to protest a video on gay marriage that was to be shown.
Colbert was disavowed by NCR’s editor, who said Colbert was a freelancer who was no longer going to write for NCR because “he made the decision to cross the line between reporter and activist.” Huh. Then why is Colbert reporting for NCR on Fr. Walter Cuenin?
uh, they thought people would forget?
My take is that NCR terminated its relationship with Colbert as a stringer on account of his move from journalist to activist and that the termination was less a “punishment” and more the ending of Colbert’s regular relationship with the weekly because Colbert had compromised that ongoing relationship. Were NCR to bring back Colbert an any regular basis, then I think that would be a reversal of the previous decision. But I don’t see that publishing one article by Colbert, more than a year after the stringer relationship was terminated, is the same thing.