After the death of Pope Francis, the Media Research Center — whose various divisions have considered themselves more Catholic than the pope — spent days afterwards whining that non-right-wingers liked him. Joseph Vazquez kicked off the whining in an April 21 post:
Apparently the recently deceased Pope Francis is the patron saint of “Mother Earth.” At least that’s what the climate Armageddon-obsessed TIME magazine is trying to argue.
TIME senior correspondent and eco-doom prophet Justin Worland’s papal obit read like a cheap comic strip: “The Climate Pope: Francis and His Environmental Legacy,” Worland’s headline read, celebrating the leftist pope for his radical eco crusaderism. According to Worland’s twisted worldview, the first big “environmental move” the pope did upon ascending to the papacy was simply “choosing the papal name Francis after Saint Francis of Assi, known among other things for his appreciation of the natural world which he called a ‘mirror of God.’”
Exactly one minute later, Curtis Houck huffed:
Between a Special Report, Today, and the 3rd Hour of Today, NBC pulled out all the stops Monday in its coverage on the death of Pope Francis, unsurprisingly heralding him as a man of the people in the left’s sense of the term for being pro-LGBTQ, “brought the Catholic Church…away from the culture wars and back to Christ’s basic message,” and waged “clashes…with…conservative members” in favor of a “plainspoken manner.”
[…]Moments later, co-host Savannah Guthrie remarked to National Catholic Reporter’s Christopher White that “in some ways, Pope Francis was a reformer and clashed with more conservative members of — of the clerical order and the cardinals.”
Nicholas Fondacaro grumbled that the pope violated right-wing ideology by refusing to hate migrants:
The death of Pope Francis provided the liberals of CBS News ample opportunity to boast about the liberal polices the pontiff promoted while also giving them a foil against President Trump’s staunch stance against illegal immigration. In their break-in and CBS Mornings newscast, the network spent a lot of their Monday morning boasting about how Francis “try[ed] to make the Catholic Church more inclusive” and stood in opposition to Trump.
CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell was brought on repeatedly since she had been the first American broadcast journalist to interview Pope Francis. It was during their breaking news bulletin that O’Donnell first proclaimed that Francis “had changed the tune but not the lyrics of the church;” a line that would become tired and played out because of how many times she and the rest of the cast uttered it (eight times).
[…]Toward the end of the segment, O’Donnell noted that “modesty” was “the hallmark of his papacy” and linked it to “why the Holy Father spent so much time talking about migrants during his papacy.”
She also recalled Francis’s worry of “the globalization of indifference” and tied it to Trump and hyped their opposition: “He asked people to think about why migrants leave their home: they are fleeing war, injustice, poverty. And so that is why it’s led him to clash with the current administration, but also I think will be one of his defining moments.”
Is there nothing the liberal media would wedge Trump into?
Jorge Bonilla served up his own fit of whining, this time that non-right-wing media noted that he made conservatives look bad:
The death of Pope Francis serves as a refresher in the perils of media projection. Mourning the loss of a perceived fellow traveler, the media have chosen to project their narrow leftwing culture and ideology on to Pope Francis.
Watch as CBS rehashes former Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell’s interview of Francis from last year, in particular: a telling exchange on conservatism:
[…]“Pope Francis was still Catholic” does not make for a sexy, transgressive headline. Instead, we get these media exercises in projection and narrative. This is why you get gauzy coverage about Francis taking the subway and living humbly, but none whatsoever about his chumminess with Latin American socialist regimes and what that entailed.
And yes, you can call that liberal mythmaking. The decision to rehash this interview on the occasion of Francis’ passing proves it.
And there were plenty more whinefests:
- ABC Frames Francis as Pope Who Stuck It to Conservatives, Embraced Gays, Palestinians
- NY Times Hails Pope Francis, as Father of ‘Inclusion’ vs. ‘Doctrinaire’ Conservatism
- Ruhle Seeks to ‘Juxtapose’ Francis, Jesus With ‘This Anti-Immigrant Movement’
- ‘Crisis of Empathy’: The View Uses Pope’s Death to Push for Open Borders
- NY Times Front: Pope Opposed ‘Xenophobia,’ Those Who ‘Demonized Migrants,’ Poor
- PolitiFact Uses Pope Francis’s Death To Defend Its Existence
- Pompous CBS Host Dickerson Appears to Use Pope’s Passing to Make Subtle Jab at Trump
- Ode to Joe: MSNBC Remembers Pope Francis By Gushing Over Biden
Tim Graham contributed to the oeuvre in his April 21 podcast, starting off by whining that it was noted Pope Benedict was a conservative:
When Pope Benedict died at the end of 2022, reporters called him “God’s Rottweiler” and NBC’s Anne Thompson said he looked “cartoonish.” The breaking news on the late Pope Francis was much more positive, he was “inclusive” and “reformist” and was “throwing doors open.” This is how liberal reporters describe someone they feel is an ally.
But isn’t Graham also projecting by defending Benedict as a conservative, even if he refuses to explicitly hang that label on him? Obviously, Graham felt Benedict was an ally.
Jeffrey Lord used his April 26 column for his own particular whine:
The recent passing of his Holiness Pope Francis and the looming election of a successor has, already, launched a media frenzy. Journalists hailed the pontiff for his “compassion” toward the LGBTQ activists looking for the Catholic Church to accept their agenda.
[…]The media loved this Left-leaning Pope from South America, on climate issues and immigration and other issues. But the use of the media by a media-savvy Pope, in this case a more Left-leaning Pope than some of his predecessors, is not new.
Lord didn’t explain why media-savvy popes are apparently a bad thing — or why they’re a bad thing only when the pope in question isn’t a right-winger.