Catholic blogger Jimmy Akin takes the popular Catholic website LifeSiteNews to task for a major headline error.

Apparently the current pope has no position one way or the other on Harry Potter. Apparently when he was a Cardinal he didn’t either.

Akin is ticked at LifeSiteNews for acting like the media and not understanding the structure of the church.

I remember this event. I gnashed my teeth during it at the stupidity of the press. The fact is, most reporters and editors are so UTTERLY CLUELESS about how the Church works that they can take some offhanded comment by a priest in a press conference and report it as an official declaration by the pope. What a bunch of individuals too ignorant to hold their own jobs!

LifeSiteNews.Com obviously was upset about it, too, as the two extracts from their current (2005) story illustrate.

But y’know what?

I also resent it when a group that is aware of this tendency of the press decides to EXPLOIT it and PLAYS THEM FOR SUCKERS.

That’s exactly what LifeSite has done.

Specifically: They have taken two brief instances of a person who was not the pope but who works at the Vatican and was speaking in a private capacity and presented them to the press in a way that they either knew or should have reasonably foreseen as causing the press to misrepresent these as official papal statements.

Akin follows through with another post saying LifeSiteNews is doing a disservice to non-Catholics.

Millions of people will see the headline “Pope Opposes Harry Potter” or “Pope Criticizes Harry Potter” or some variant and never read the story or they will read it but lack the skill at parsing such stories to see how misleadingly the matter is being framed. Millions of people scan the Drudge Report alone every day and read its headlines (like the one on this story) without ever clicking them. Their impression of many of its news stories is formed entirely by the headlines.

Some of the people seeing the LifeSite-inspired headlines on this subject will be non-Catholic fans of Harry Potter, and in their estimation the Catholic Church will have the Church’s credibility lowered one more notch.

Thanks, LifeSite.