Catholic News Service: Still Playing Pravda to the USCCB Kremlin?

Recently, when I noticed that a Catholic News Service article at National Catholic Reporter about the Komen-Planned Parenthood debacle had been gutted and revised with no notice of this to readers, and when I saw that both versions of the article were nothing but gross propaganda for the USCCB with its "religious freedom" crusade, I wrote, 

. . . Catholic News Service has turned itself into something of a yellow rag outlet, as it reports about the HHS controversy and the Komen-Planned Parenthood kerfuffle.  CNS is rapidly transforming itself into Pravda to the USCCB Kremlin, and is churning out one article after another that purports to report on the issues, when all these articles do is toe the party line, and with increasingly shrill hyperbole.

In the posting to which I just linked, I also noted that at Commonweal, Grant Gallicho had remarked, as well, on the growing trend of CNS to try to pass off opinion pieces about the bishops' "religious freedom" crusade as news stories.  Yesterday, Gallicho published yet another analysis of recent CNS news coverage which suggests that this once-credible news organization is now turning itself into a shameful shill (my words, not Gallicho's) for the USCCB.

Gallicho asks if CNS is still editorially independent of the USCCB, and he proposes that if this is not the case, then CNS has an obligation to disclose that information to its readers.  I'd be curious to know the answer to that question myself.  What I saw CNS do with that Komen-Planned Parenthood article at NCR a few weeks ago was shoddy journalism in the extreme--shoddy journalism that calls into serious doubt the credibility of CNS as a journalistic outlet.

If I didn't know any better, I'd conclude that the USCCB is so hellbent on playing politics right now, in attacking the Obama administration, that it has been spending quite a bit of its time and energy in the last year meeting in closed-door sessions with key anti-Obama political players to cook up a scheme to try to throw the 2012 elections.  And the scheming requires CNS, as the leading Catholic news outlet in the nation, to toe the party line, or else.

As I say, if I didn't know any better, that's the conclusion I'd be inclined to reach as I watch the behavior of the USCCB in recent months, and CNS's craven capitulation to that behavior.  

Serge Tsukasov, managing editor of Pravda, once blandly distinguished the editorial policy of his newspaper from that of less exalted publications like the New York Times by observing: "Our approach to stories is different from, say, a paper like the New York Times.  We direct ourselves to problems, not events."

And, of course, what that meant was that Pravda (whose title translates as "truth") wrote what the Kremlin told it to write.  And had long since forfeited any journalistic integrity as it functioned as an outright propaganda vehicle for the Kremlin.  As it forfeited any claim to speak the truth . . . .

It appears CNS is now intent in getting to the same place--to its shame.