The headline “Many Catholics react favorably to Brown’s election” occupied a front-page slot in the Boston Pilot of January 22, 2010.

I nominate it as among the most biased newspaper leads in recent history and one of the most banal.  Were a respectable secular newspaper to have published such a one-sided head, surely it would become the target of outraged protest. This official house organ for the Archdiocese of Boston, however, can expect to get away with pro-Republican propaganda.

The story could just as well have run “Many Catholics react unfavorably to Brown’s election,” an equally banal lead story. But that would have betrayed Democratic rather than Republican bias.

Has the Pilot not yet discovered how Scott Brown holds the same position on abortion as does Martha Coakley, his defeated Democratic candidate for U.S. senator?

Would not the Catholics of the Boston archdiocese be better served by an independent newspaper published by laypeople? That’s the way it was before the then archbishop of Boston, Cardinal O’Connell, bought the paper in 1908. Perhaps this journal would then avoid such clearly one-sided approaches to political life.