Journalism is supposed to be about informing people. Sometimes, journalists do the opposite, though, and misinform them. Today, the Kansas City Star is misinforming readers.
The headline, “Woman claims role as Kansas City’s first female Catholic priest,” is grossly misleading. You might think that a woman has become a Catholic priest. Of course, this hasn’t happened. The best defense the KC Star has is that it is using the word “claims” not in the sense it does in headlines like “Hugo claims title in South Africa,” about a guy who actually won a golf title, but in the sense of “claims to be….”
At best, the headline is misleadingly ambiguous, at worst it’s false.
The lead of the article tries to introduce some balance or skepticism:
This, again, is drawing readers away from the truth. The first half of the sentence states something false — that this woman became a Catholic priest. The second half of the sentence leaves the impression that there’s a debate about whether the first half is true.
There is no debate. The people who claim she’s a priest have zero authority to declare that she’s a priest. An equivalent line would be “Louie Gohmert became King of England Saturday — at least according to Gohmert and his buddies.”
If the point of the story was to make Walker and her friends look like deluded people, then I suppose this lead is a fine, witty, biting way to do it. But that’s not what this article does.
After vaguely siding with the mistaken Walker in the head and the lead, the rest of the piece plays it as a “he-said/she-said” story. But it’s not. Only Catholic bishops can ordain someone a priest. There’s no debate over this. Even if the KC Star didn’t know this fact, they might have taken a clue about the legitimacy of this “ordination” from the fact that the ceremony was a “service at St. Mark Hope and Peace Lutheran Church.”
