"The Global Media Are Becoming Less and Less Accountable"

Especially if that being reported has anything to do with Christianity, most especially if it's Catholic.

Eamonn Fingleton at Forbes with more:

Few of us are inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, and that applies in spades to journalists running with a sensational news story. But even by normal media standards, recent reports about the bones of 796 babies being found in the septic tank of an Irish orphanage betray a degree of cynicism and irresponsibility rarely surpassed by allegedly reputable news organizations.

Although the media attributed the “dumped in a septic tank” allegation to Catherine Corless, a local amateur historian, she denies making it. Her attempt to correct the record was reported by the Irish Times newspaper on Saturday (see here) but has been almost entirely ignored by the same global media that so gleefully recycled the original suggestion. That suggestion, which  seems to have first surfaced in the Mail on Sunday, a London-based newspaper, reflected appallingly on the Sisters of Bon Secours, the order of Catholic nuns at the center of the scandal.

Today the Irish Times has published a reader’s letter that has further undercut the story. Finbar McCormick, a professor of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, sharply admonished the media for describing the children’s last resting place as a septic tank. He added: “The structure as described is much more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many part of Europe.

“In the 19th century, deep brick-lined shafts were constructed and covered with a large slab which often doubled as a flatly laid headstone. These were common in 19th-century urban cemeteries…..Such tombs are still used extensively in Mediterranean countries. I recently saw such structures being constructed in a churchyard in Croatia. The shaft was made of concrete blocks, plastered internally and roofed with large concrete slabs.

“Many maternity hospitals in Ireland had a communal burial place for stillborn children or those who died soon after birth. These were sometimes in a nearby graveyard but more often in a special area within the grounds of the hospital.”

For anyone familiar with Ireland (I was brought up there in the 1950s and 1960s),  the story of nuns consciously throwing babies into a septic tank never made much sense. Although many aforesaid nuns might have been holier-than-thou harridans, they were nothing if not God-fearing and therefore unlikely to treat human remains with the sort of outright blasphemy implied in the septic tank story.

So what are we left with? One fact seems beyond dispute: conditions in Irish orphanages up to the 1960s, if not later, were positively Dickensian. Certainly the death rate at many was shockingly high. But how should blame be apportioned? A major part of the problem would appear to have been the pervasive poverty of the time (the institution at the center of the scandal operated from the 1920s through the early 1960s). Because they were so desperately underfunded, Irish orphanages were disgracefully overcrowded, which meant that when one baby caught an infection, they all caught it. Not the least of the hazards was tuberculosis, a then incurable disease that spread like wildfire in overcrowded conditions.

The nuns who ran the orphanage have long since gone to their reward but if they could speak for themselves they would no doubt claim they were doing their best in appalling circumstances. Certainly it is reasonable to suggest that the wider Irish society of those days cannot be exempt from blame. As for the nuns, they were so young when they entered religious life — typically in their late teens or early 20s — that they had little understanding of the secular world and were evidently short on managerial skills. Less forgivably, however, they took a highly puritanical attitude to the “fallen women” who had the misfortune to come under their purview.  Allegedly they even — in some cases at least — banned the use of anesthetics in childbirth, the better to ensure that mothers would atone for the “sin” of having an out-of-wedlock child.

At the end of the day, the verifiable facts that have emerged so far amount merely to a strong story for the media of  one small country. The one “fact” that turned all this from a disturbing national story to a screaming global sensation is one that is almost certainly false.

There is a moral here for those who are increasingly bewildered by the modern world: the global media are becoming less and less accountable.

Kevin Clarke underscore this lack of accountability over at America, The National Catholic Review:

The Irish Times also tracked down one of the “boys” who had uncovered the water? septic? tank cover on the site of the old home. Barry Sweeney, who was 10, not 12, when he made his frightening discovery. “There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins,” he says. “But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” 

How many skeletons does he believe there were? [Irish Times reporter, Rosita] Boland asks. 

“About 20,” Sweeney tells her.

What is certainly known is that over 36 years on average 22 children each year died at the Tuam home. The final figure may be higher. “The deaths of these 796 children are not in doubt,” reports Boland. “Their numbers are a stark reflection of a period in Ireland when infant mortality in general was very much higher than today, particularly in institutions, where infection spread rapidly. At times during those 36 years the Tuam home housed more than 200 children and 100 mothers, plus those who worked there, according to records Corless has found.”

According to a review of the death certificates by The Irish Times; “the children are marked as having died variously of tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, influenza, bronchitis and meningitis, among other illnesses.” Some of the children who died may have been buried in an abandoned tank, which may have been used as a septic tank as late as 1937. Others may have been buried in other unmarked sites on the grounds. Despite the increasingly extravagant accounts of the U.S., U.K., Irish and now international media, 800 baby bodies have not been located in a septic tanks. In fact there is no reason to believe any babies were ever “dumped” into a septic tank, as many media reports have depicted it. Corless speculates (let’s repeat together, “speculates”) that the sisters may have converted an unused tank into a crypt for some burials. 

A government investigation of the site, that among other agenda items will seek to find the unmarked graves of these deceased children, is beginning and the Archbishop of Tuam has committed the diocese to seeing to a proper burial for any remains that are discovered. The Bon Secours sisters have assured that they will cooperate as much as they are able to with the investigation.

As for the “Galway, gothic, Irish holocaust,”or however it may come to be officially known, it may prove to be a holocaust mostly of sloppy and indifferent reporting and twitter/Facebook frenzying, e-mail and fury signifying nothing more than how quickly misinformation can travel in our socially-mediated era.

Not only are we learning how quickly misinformation travels today but we're also learning how quickly this misinformation is believed and passed on as gospel truth.

We live in an age of gullibility and no more gullible are there than those who are quick to believe lies about the Church.

God help us remain discerning.