As a rule, network television newscasts shed more heat than light. If you want an accurate story, you read the newspaper. Television broadcasters are not selling the news; they are selling advertisements. So when you turn on a network news “magazine” you can expect as much entertainment as information.

Nevertheless, when the ABC show “20/20” promised a report on “Priests with AIDS,” I could not contain my curiosity. I had only recently read CWR’s November cover story on homosexuality in the priesthood, and the heated correspondence that ensued. What sort of “spin” would an American network put on the story? I wondered.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the most blatant manipulation of truth was done not by the ABC correspondents, but by a spokesman for the US Catholic bishops! Responding to the Kansas City Star’s report that 300 American priests have died of AIDS, Sister Maryanne Walsh allowed: “It concerns me terribly that anybody has AIDS. And even more so it concerns me that 300 of our church leaders, of our priests, would have AIDS.” However, Sister Walsh continued, “even if you doubled that number, you’d have less than 1 percent [of the number of priests now serving in the United States]. So while you have 300 tragic stories there, you don’t have a trend in the priesthood.”

Now if you are really testing for “a trend in the priesthood,” you might take the statistic on priestly AIDS casualties and place it alongside some other relevant numbers. How does the number of AIDS deaths compare with the number of priests killed by cancers and heart attacks? Among younger men, how does it compare with the death toll from car accidents? Are priests statistically more likely to die of AIDS than, say, plumbers or stockbrokers? Any such comparisons might be instructive.

But Sister Walsh measures the number of priests who have died of AIDS against the number of priests who are still alive. The figure thereby produced has no meaning. Or to be more accurate, her analysis demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of priests who are alive today have not died of AIDS. But you probably could have worked that out for yourself.

Why would Sister Walsh choose to make such a pointless comparison? Imagine that a lobbyist for the tobacco industry set out to downplay the link between cigarettes and lung cancer by pointing out that at any given moment, the vast majority of smokers are free of cancer symptoms—or that the cigarette smokers who are alive today outnumber the ones who have succumbed to cancer. Would you suspect that the lobbyist was distorting the statistical picture deliberately?

And by the way, even if only 0.5 percent of American priests contract AIDS (again, that is not what the statistics indicate), that figure would be anything but trivial. Imagine that you were the police chief of a city with a population of 100,000. If 500 residents of that city were murdered, would you deny the existence of a frightening trend in violent crime?

Knight of the airwaves
But it’s time to change channels. The promotional trailers have told me about a sensational new “reality TV” show entitled “Temptation Island.”

The premise of this show is that young men and women—all of them physically attractive, all of them unmarried, but some engaged in “committed relationships” with others—are left alone on an island. Viewers will then wait to see which men couple with which women: who fornicates with whom. The contestants selected to participate in this show, network publicists piously disclosed, had been tested in advance for venereal diseases.

“Temptation Island” is the latest of many efforts by the Fox network to pander to the baser instincts of television viewers. The Fox network is controlled by the billionaire media entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch is a papal knight.

Cardinal Roger Mahony, you see, is not confused by statistics—at least not when the archdiocesan budget is concerned. Murdoch made heavy contributions to the building fund for a new cathedral in Los Angeles. So the cardinal proposed him for papal honors. No one involved in the process even bothered to pretend that the process was more complicated than that.

No one who watches prime-time television on a regular basis should be shocked by the moral decadence of “Temptation Island.” On any given night, a half-dozen sitcoms are dominated by lighthearted banter about extramarital sex, and one or two melodramas include bedroom scenes. It was only a matter of time before some show based its plot development on fornication that was not merely discussed, nor even staged, but actually performed by the cast.

Whenever television executives see an opportunity to break another moral barrier, producers will dutifully rush to occupy the new ground. But I admit that I was taken aback when a papal knight led the latest charge. I hope it’s not a trend.

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