Imagine that former Vice President Dick Cheney was set to be honored next month at a Catholic university's commencement ceremony and news came down that another person to be honored at the same ceremony with a different award declined the honor, stating that she felt it inappropriate for the university to honor a man who believes in and furthered the use of torture by condoning waterboarding of enemy combatants.
The press, it's safe to say, would have a field day. But that's not the case with the news of Mary Ann Glendon -- a pro-life Catholic and Harvard professor who is displeased with Notre Dame honoring pro-choice President Barack Obama -- declining to accept the Laetare Award from Notre Dame University.
Yesterday evening NewsBusters Editor-at-Large Brent Baker noted that only NBC's "Nightly News" touched on the story, and that only briefly. This morning, not even NBC's "Today" show mentioned the development in the ongoing commencement speech controversy. Broadcast TV competitors "Good Morning America" and CBS's "The Early Show" ignored the story as well.
For their part, the nation's newspapers generally punted on the story. A search of major newspapers in Nexis yielded only four hits, none of which came from the New York Times or USA Today. The longest story by a newspaper staffer came from Boston Globe's Michael Paulson, clocking in at 829 words and gracing the front page of the paper's metro section.
Wire stories in the Los Angeles Times (page A12) and Washington Post (page A4) and a brief mention in Newsday's "Obama's First 100 Days" digest (page A20) made up the other three hits generated from a Nexis search of April 28 newspapers.
