Cut loose by the Vatican, frail George Pell admitted to hospital. By John Ferguson in The Australian.
A frail George Pell has been admitted to hospital, emerging briefly in Sydney for the first time yesterday after being removed as one of the Pope’s inner circle of advisers. …
Cardinal Pell has been in Australia since the middle of last year and is facing prosecution in the County Court of Victoria for historical child sexual offences. He has denied any wrongdoing.
However, there are Australian gag orders on his two trials, only one of which is complete. Local news sources won’t tell you the results of the trial, or even that there is a result.
Even overseas accounts give almost no details of what he was being tried for, though they do give the result of the first trial.
An Australian court’s gag order is no match for the Internet, by Paul Fahri at the WaPo.
The New York Times withheld any mention of Pell’s conviction on its website, despite having given substantial coverage to the allegations against him in the months leading up to his trial. The Times’s most recent story on the matter, dated Wednesday, reported that the Vatican had removed Pell and another cardinal from a council of advisers selected by Pope Francis and that Pell had been “implicated” in a sexual-abuse case. But it didn’t report the outcome of that case, except in its U.S. print editions.
The Times’ deputy general counsel, David McCraw, said the newspaper is abiding by the court’s order in Australia “because of the presence of our bureau there. It is deeply disappointing that we are unable to present this important story to our readers in Australia and elsewhere. … Press coverage of judicial proceedings is a fundamental safeguard of justice and fairness. A free society is never well served by a silenced press.”
The Associated Press and Reuters news services — two of the largest news organizations in the world — also did not report the news about Pell. Both services have bureaus in Australia that could face potential liability.
The Washington Post reported Pell’s conviction on Wednesday. But its story was removed from Apple News, the news aggregation app owned by Apple Inc. that is available in the United Kingdom, U.S. and Australia.
NPR, the Daily Beast and the National Catholic Reporter, among others, also reported Pell’s conviction.
The suppression order led to bizarrely curtailed reports in the Australian media, but did little to stop the news from emerging on social media.
A story in the Sydney Morning Herald published Wednesday, for example, didn’t refer to the name, position or even gender of the person involved. One of its story began, “A very high-profile figure was convicted on Tuesday of a serious crime, but we are unable to report their identity due to a suppression order. The person, whose case has attracted significant media attention, was convicted on the second attempt, after the jury in an earlier trial was unable to reach a verdict. They will be remanded when they return to court in February for sentencing.”
The Herald Sun of Melbourne ran the story on its front page on Thursday under a bold headline: “Censored.”
Just search online.
George Pell opposed the globalists. He publicly said on several occasions that the carbon dioxide theory of global warming was bunk, and he is of course a prominent Christian. The deep state demonizes anyone speaking out against their self-serving climate theory. It is busy trashing the churches by linking them incessantly to child abuse. Pell would be a high-priority target.
Pell’s first jury did not find him guilty — it was hung. But maybe the tenor of the times (“it’s the vibe of the thing” — The Castle) meant the cards were stacked against him the second time around. Pell claims he is innocent. Decades have passed, what might have happened was secret, memories are malleable, witnesses might be egged on by the deep state and perhaps rewarded in some ways. Is the truth even knowable at this distance? No idea, because the trial is hushed up.
hat-tip Joanne
