Justice Clarence Thomas: When a News Story Becomes the News

Despite known threats against Supreme Court justices, an April CNN report revealed the home address of the elderly mother of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

May 10, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Hours after I began this post, I was forced to abandon it and start over. Just as I sat before my typewriter, popular FOX News host Tucker Carlson was fired from the network for reasons that I am certain will be clearer but no less controversial by the time this is posted. On the same day, CNN Morning News host Don Lemon was also fired, but entirely unrelated to the FOX News story. Both events shook the world of cable television news media.

Whatever the reasons behind them, however, they could not possibly rise to the clear and present danger posed from a violation of journalistic standards that stayed mostly off the rest of the media radar in recent weeks. The only reference I have seen to its seriousness was in an April 21, 2023 column by James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Justice Thomas and the Plague of Bad Reporting.”

James Taranto is the WSJ Editorial Features Editor. His column that day was a very good report about some very bad journalism. It took a complex development and systematically presented it in clear prose. If you cannot see it due to the WSJ pay wall, I want to present some of its highlights. Its subject was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a short list of supposed “ethics violations” touted in some news venues with lots of partisan spin. Mr. Taranto, especially critical of coverage in two Washington DC media venues, wrote: “The Washington Post and ProPublica commit comically incompetent journalism. But by stirring up animus, they increase the risk of a tragic ending.”

The “risk of a tragic ending” refers to some related coverage at CNN. Among the published claims from ProPublica was a charge that the 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas has been living rent free in a property formerly owned in part by Thomas but sold in 2016 to longtime friend, Harlan Crow. When Justice Thomas sold his one-third interest in the property, at a substantial loss, he was required to report the sale, but did not. It was an oversight. A source said that Thomas erroneously believed he did not have to report the sale because he sold it at a loss and none of the entities involved had a case before his Court.

Mr. Taranto went on to explain that the oversight is a rather common one. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Ketanji Brown Jackson had all committed the same oversight which in each case was corrected by simply filing an amendment to the respective year’s report. That same simple correction should have been afforded to Justice Thomas as well, but instead ProPublica pounced on the story in April, presenting it as a gross violation of judicial ethics. It was an oversight that could have been easily corrected within the rules, but that did not stop The Washington Post from also hyping the story for partisan reasons.

The story, as later reported by CNN, was that, as part of a negotiated $133,363 sale price of the home and property in 2016, then 85-year-old Leola Williams, the mother of Justice Thomas, was given an occupancy agreement by the buyer to be able to remain in her home rent free for the rest of her life. She remained responsible for property taxes and insurance. The occupancy agreement was with her and not with Justice Thomas who sold the modest home at a loss to a company owned by longtime friend, Harlan Crow. Ms. Williams is now 92 years of age.

Ethics and Common Sense at CNN

It is perhaps providential that Harlan Crow’s first name is not “Jim.” It did not take long for the political left to turn this story into a scandal, though with some difficulty. Something terribly nefarious was imagined lurking beneath the fact that a white billionaire might offer such a gesture of mercy to an elderly black woman. Former ProPublica president Richard Tofel wrote of this on Twitter: “Can’t imagine how any reasonable person could distinguish this from Crow giving Thomas cash every month.”

In publishing this story on Monday, April 17,2023, CNN followed this “incompetent reporting” by “increasing the risk of a tragic ending.” The potential tragic ending was this: The CNN report also published the home address of the now 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas. That was the only real scandal in this story. With help from a friend, I published the following comment on James Taranto’s Wall Street Journal column:

“In 2022, I was invited by the Pew Research Center to participate in its Survey of Journalists about the state of journalism and news reporting in America, both broadcast and print. One result was a widely expressed dismay by journalists that journalistic ethics are routinely compromised in favor of partisan politics. Apparently, the participating journalists have not done enough to counter this concern.

“The most disturbing part of Mr.Taranto’s column is a revelation that CNN reported the address of the elderly mother of Justice Clarence Thomas. There can be no acceptable explanation for this dangerous and irresponsible setting aside of journalistic ethics in favor of one-sided political gain. The news department at CNN is under new management. Viewers were assured that there would be changes in the way news is presented there. We were promised news with less opinionated partisan influence.

“Whoever at CNN published the address should be fired. Whoever provided oversight to allow this to happen should also be fired, especially in light of other attempted attacks and harassment at the homes of other Supreme Court justices. After this serious breach of ethics, I am deleting CNN from my television channel list until CNN can live up to its promise. This is the only way consumers of the news can speak truth to power. Actions like this at CNN tell me that power takes precedence over truth.”

— Gordon J. Mac Rae, The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2023

A Jarring 2020 Flashback

This was really all about Roe v. Wade and it could easily be interpreted as a reminder to those off the rails that reprisals are now called for. Addressing a crowd of angry pro-abortion supporters in March 2020, then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) leveled threats against two Supreme Court Justices:

“We know what’s at stake. Over the last three years, women’s reproductive rights have come under attack in a way we haven’t seen in modern history. Republican legislatures are waging a war on women, and they’re taking away fundamental rights. I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”

— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

We all saw the jeering protesters lobbing threats at the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices. Early in the morning of June 8, 2022, two weeks before the leaked decision on Roe v. Wade was formally published, U.S. marshals arrested an armed man trying to break into the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He told police that he had begun “thinking about how to give his life purpose” so he decided to kill Justice Kavanaugh after finding his address on the internet. All of this was known to CNN before publishing the address of the 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas.

I know that CNN is not the only news venue that packages news along partisan lines. According to media expert, Alex S. Jones in his 2010 book, Losing the News (Oxford Press). “CNN and MSNBC have shifted their focus from news to opinion in pursuit of FOX News’s highly successful mix of news and advocacy.” In the month before this breach of ethics at CNN, its ratings had soared 35-percent since the New York indictment of former president Donald Trump. Its audience base was already highly charged. And it goes without saying that if Donald Trump had said in public what Senator Chuck Schummer said on the steps of the Supreme Court, that story would have eclipsed all other news.

A March 26, 2023 You Gov poll of trust in broadcast news services asked respondents to address two questions: 1) which of the following TV networks do you watch to keep up with the news? And 2) Which TV networks do you most trust for news? The combined results were definitive: Fox News 41%; ABC News 24%; CNN 22%; CBS 22%; NBC 21%; MSNBC 18%.

Whether our readers agree with the partisan spin of any of these news networks is beside the point. There is clearly a ratings war going on, and networks that have trailed in ratings have also suffered a decline in advertising dollars, the networks’ sole source of income. Most viewers who consistently choose one network over another tend to do so not just because they want the news, but also because they want their own belief system to be affirmed. This was the number two complaint among journalists in the recent Pew Research Center Survey of Journalists in which I and this blog were invited to participate.

Taking part in that survey is not a bragging point. If anything, it made me realize how much I am also a slave to a news service and its fundamental frame of mind. The blending of news and opinion is a toxic but alluring mix. Once I became conscious of this, I have tried to view news networks with opposing views, but it hasn’t been easy. Two years after the election of 2020, one of these networks remains dedicated to 24-hour coverage of “get Trump at any cost.” Another seems wedded to the idea that we are all unrepentant racists. When I leave a news program feeling angry and riled, just imagine how an already fired-up mob is responding.

At least one cooler head has prevailed. After reading the above column and two recent sequels by The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, I am convinced that the ethics claims against Justice Clarence Thomas are entirely contrived and reported along partisan lines to support a strictly partisan bias.

Along those same lines, the Gallup Poll now reports that 70% of Democrats, 27% of Independents, and only 14% of Republicans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence in the current state of journalism.

Have an opinion? I would love to hear it, but please don’t shoot the messenger!

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Two final notes from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Forty-four years ago on May 11, 1979, my friend Father Joseph Sands was murdered in the rectory of St. Rose of Lima parish in the town of Littleton, New Hampshire. The years to follow revealed that this troubling story had many mysterious tentacles into the case that sent me to wrongful imprisonment. Ryan A. MacDonald untangled those tentacles in “The Story Buried Under the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

On a very different note, Sunday May 14 is Mothers Day in the United States. It is a day to honor our mothers, both living and deceased. I would like to think that after all these years of injustice, I managed to bring some poetic justice to my mother in “Mothers Day Promises to Keep, and Miles to Go Before I Sleep.”

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Catholic Scandal and The Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic

“The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Ch. 10 (1925)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tribute to Saint Maximilian Kolbe on the April 28th anniversary of his ordination. I made a controversial point in that post:

“Almost without exception, the typical claims of abuse by Catholic priests so roiling the news media were alleged to have happened thirty to forty years ago.”

Go back just another thirty to forty years, I wrote, and you will find yourself right in the middle of the Nazi horror that engulfed Europe and claimed the lives of six million Jews and millions of others. I suggested that Catholics should not accept what some would now impose: that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the Twentieth Century.

A TSW reader responded to that insight by sending me a rather startling document.  As I began to read it, I almost tossed it aside dismissing it as just another sensational headline. You might be tempted to do the same.  Resist that temptation, please, and keep reading:

“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”

This isn’t an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, nor is it the opening gun in a new lawsuit by Jeffrey Anderson. It also isn’t a quote from S.N.A.P. or V.O.T. F. It is part of a speech delivered on May 28, 1937 by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich.

As a direct result of Goebbels’ speech, 325 Catholic priests representing every diocese in Germany were arrested and sent to prison. The story was uncovered by Italian sociologist and author, Massimo Introvigne and republished by LifeSiteNews.com. According to Mr. Introvigne, the term “moral panic” is a modern term used since the 1970s “to identify a social alarm created artificially by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers” and by “presenting as ‘new’ events which in reality are already known and which date to the past.”

It all has a terribly familiar ring. Though “moral panic” wasn’t a term used in 1937, it describes exactly what Joseph Goebbels was called upon by the Third Reich to create.  And the propaganda campaign, like the current one, had nothing to do with protecting children. It was launched by the Third Reich because of a 1937 Papal Encyclical by Pope Pius XI entitled “Mit brennender Sorge” — “With burning concern” — in which the Pope condemned Nazi ideology. According to Matthew Cullinan Hoffman of lifeSiteNews.com, the encyclical was smuggled out of Rome into Germany and read from every pulpit in every Catholic parish in the Reich.

The propaganda campaign launched by Goebbels was later exposed as a clear exaggeration and exploitation of a few cases of sexual abuse that were all too real, but for which the Church had taken decisive action. In the end, the vast majority of the priests arrested and imprisoned, their reputations destroyed and the Church’s moral authority in Germany impugned — were quietly set free. When the campaign finally evaporated, only six percent of the 325 priests accused were ultimately condemned, and it is a certainty that among even those were some who were falsely accused.

By the end of the war, according to Introvigne, “the perfidy of the campaign of Goebbels aroused more indignation than the eventual guilt” of a relatively small number of priests — a number that was a mere percentage of those first accused.

The accused priests were not Goebbels’ real target, of course. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda targeted the Church and its bishops and papacy declaring a cover-up of the claims and keeping the matter in the daily headlines.

According to Massimo Introvigne who uncovered this story, “Goebbels’ campaign followed the same pattern seen in recent media attacks on the Church.” Like today’s moral panic, the Goebbels campaign attempted to revive old claims that had long since been resolved to keep the matter in public view and to discredit the Catholic Church.

It was all because of the Papal encyclical denouncing Nazi ideology and tactics and defending “the Church’s Jewish heritage against Hitler’s racist attacks,” according to Hoffman.

Consider the Source

How the Massimo Introvigne article came to me makes for an interesting aside. It was sent to me by a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated twenty-two years ago by a priest in my diocese, a priest with whom I once served in ministry. The young man he violated has worked to overcome his anger and to embrace the grace of forgiveness. He sought and obtained a modest settlement for the abuse he suffered years ago, and he used it for counseling expenses. This man is a reader of These Stone Walls who recently wrote to me:

“I have been scouring the Internet and doing a great deal of reading … For what it is worth, I believe you are serving an unjust sentence for a crime you did not commit. If I do not do everything in my power to be of assistance to you, I would be committing a grave sin.”

That is certainly a far different reaction than the rhetoric of most other claimants against priests and their “advocates” among contingency lawyers and the victim groups that are receiving major donations from contingency lawyers. My more recent exchanges with this man lead me to conclude something I have long believed: that the people most repulsed and offended by false claims of abuse and the rhetoric of a witch hunt should be the real victims of sexual abuse.

It is no longer the Nazi state that stands to win big from the creation of a moral panic targeting the Catholic Church and priesthood. But the current propaganda campaign is little different in either its impetus or its result.

Dr. Thomas Plante, Ph.D., a professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, published an article entitled “Six important points you don’t hear about regarding clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church” (Psychology Today, March 24, 2010). Dr. Plante’s conclusions from studying the empirical data are far different from what you may read in any propaganda campaign — either the 1937 one or the one underway now. These are Dr. Plante’s conclusions:

“Catholic clergy are not more likely to abuse children than other clergy or men in general.” [As I pointed out in “Due Process for Accused Priests,” priests convicted of sexual abuse account for no more than three (3) out of 6,000 incarcerated, paroled, and registered sex offenders.]

“Clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church cannot be blamed on celibacy.” The majority of men convicted of sexual abuse are married and/or divorced.

“Almost all of the clergy sexual abuse cases that we hear about in the news are from decades ago,” most from the 1960s to 1970s.

“Most clergy sex offenders are not pedophiles.” Eighty percent of accusers were post-pubescent teens, and not children, when abuse was alleged to have occurred.”

“There is much to be angry about,” Dr. Plante concluded, but anger about the above media-fueled misconceptions is misplaced. Why this isn’t clearer in the secular press is no mystery? As one observer of the news media wrote,

“More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudice of his audience.”

— Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America, Ch. 9, (1988)

You know I was born on April 9, 1953. That was just eight years to the day after Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at age 39 on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. It was to be Hitler’s last gesture of contempt for truth before he took his own life as the Allies advanced on Germany in April, 1945.

Since childhood, I have been aware that I shared this date with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man I greatly admire. He was imprisoned and hanged because he made a decision of conscience to resist Hitler with every ounce of strength God gave him. I concluded my Holy Week post with an excerpt of his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship.

The truth of what happened in Germany and Poland emerged into full public view just sixty-five years ago. The entire world recoiled in horror and revulsion. The revelations changed the world, radically altering humanity’s world view. It marked the dawn of the age of cynicism and distrust. How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?

As the truth slowly emerged during the years of war and slaughter, The New York Times, in its 1942 Christmas Day editorial declared:

“No Christmas sermon reaches a larger congregation than the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world at this season. This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent.”

In 1942, The New York Times was joined in its acclaim of Pope Pius XII by the World Jewish Congress, Albert Einstein, and Golda Meir. The March 2010 issue of Catalyst reported that Pope Pius was officially recognized for directly saving the lives of 860,000 Jews while the chief rabbi in Rome, Eugenio Zolli, converted to Catholicism and took the name “Eugenio” in honor of the Pope’s (Eugenio Pacelli) challenge of the Nazi regime.

The New York Times has sure changed its tune since then, and has helped build a revisionist history of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church that takes a polar opposite point of view. Today, commending a pope, or even mentioning Christmas, would be anathema to the Times’ editorial agenda.

By the end of April, 1945, within days of ordering Dietrich Bonhoeffer hanged, Adolf Hitler took his own life. Joseph Goebbels, intensely loyal to Hitler, murdered his wife and children before also committing suicide. The terror and propaganda of the Third Reich were over.

The propaganda of the current moral panic is just getting fully underway, however. British atheist Richard Dawkins has declared the Catholic Church to be “a child-raping institution” and wrote in The Washington Post a few weeks ago of Pope Benedict’s planned visit to England in September:

“This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares 
set foot outside the tin pot fiefdom of the Vatican and he should be tried in an appropriate civil court.”

Does this sound like reasonable discourse to you? And it isn’t just the secular press engaged in this sort of hate speech. I was utterly dismayed a few weeks ago to see a highly respected Catholic weekly newspaper box off and highlight a letter from a reader calling for the imprisonment of all priests accused from thirty and forty years ago.

Don’t be so quick to consign 80-year-old men to prison for things alleged to have happened decades ago — things that cannot be proven at all. It’s tempting to toss the rights of all priests out the window in the heat of a global media witch trial, but it is not the way of our Church to abandon all reason in favor of the mob.

The secular press is going to do what it always does: sell newspapers to the mob. But this hateful rhetoric should not be appearing in the Catholic press. Calling upon the Vatican to set aside the rights of priests under Church law is no way to conclude the Year of the Priest.

Adopting the rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels simply doesn’t bring light to the issues. It is caving in to our basest nature, and reflects not the Truth upon which our faith is built. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, would be calling Catholics to a much higher standard of discipleship.

Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazi ideology in his 1937 Encyclical "Mit bennender Sorge."