Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Because only a handful of students turned out for the March 12 protest against San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s new teacher’s contract, the media used footage from an earlier protest to make it look as if even the students are against the idea of preserving the Catholic identity in Catholic high schools.

The California Catholic Daily is reporting that a March 12 gathering staged in front of San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral was intended to protest an Archdiocesan initiative mandating that Catholic school teachers and staff not publicly take positions in opposition to Church teaching. The protest received heavy media attention and headlines such as that of KPIX which blared: “San Francisco Catholic Students Slam Morality Clauses In Latest Protest, Say Archbishop Is Out Of Step.” NBC’s headline was similar: “Students Protest SF Archbishop Morality Clause.”

The only problem is that only about 35 of the area’s 3,000 Catholic high school students showed up for the protest. But that didn’t stop the press from sensationalizing the event.

“CBS was forced to pad their coverage with video of students at a similar demonstration that took place on Ash Wednesday," the Daily discovered. "At least a third of those in attendance at the event were not students (unless high schools are now teaching ladies with gray hair and men whose hair has waved goodbye) but activist adults.”

The Daily revealed that one of the “student protestors” was actually Brian Cahill, a writer for the dissident National Catholic Reporter, and a long-time opponent of the Church.

Another was Erick Orantes, an employee of the city and county of San Francisco who worked as an intern with the infamous pro-abortion Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. KPIX devoted almost their entire coverage to Orantes’ opinion, tossed in a few dissenting students, and called it a news article. Not a single person among the tens of thousands who support Cordileone’s initiative was interviewed. In fact, a majority of the people who commented on the KPIX article sided with the Archbishop!

This devious attack on the Church is being orchestrated by Sam Singer, a successful PR maven with a big price tag who admitted that he had been hired to launch a media blitz to defeat the Archbishop’s policies.  Although the media claims he was hired by “concerned parents and teachers”, his enormous fees make it more likely that some of the city’s most influential are behind this attack.

To their NBC at least tried to appear impartial by interviewing one man named Daniel Kahn who agreed with the Archbishop’s initiative. “On the grounds that it is a Catholic school and they adhere to Catholic teaching,” Kahn said. “I would say it has to fall in parallelism with Catholic Church doctrine.”

This kind of duplicitous news coverage goes on every day in the U.S. and is a major reason why the mainstream media is so distrusted by the public. Polls taken as recently as September 2014 have found that only 40% of the American people trust what they hear in the news, which is among the lowest numbers ever recorded.

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