Publisher, editor fired over Canadian PM communion controversy

Remember that "Canadian Prime Minister pockets consecrated host!" story from earlier this month? 

In my coverage, I focused on the duty of the officiating Archbishop to refrain from giving communion to someone who isn't in communion with the Church. 

AmP readers were also quick to point out that in the distributed video, the Prime Minister is not actually seen "pocketing" the consecrated host.

Well, it looks like he did actually consume it, instead of pocketing it, and the publisher and editor cooked the story on the writers:

"The publisher and editor of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal are no longer with the paper after it was forced to apologize to Stephen Harper and two of its own reporters over a story about whether the prime minister took communion at the state funeral of former governor general Roméo LeBlanc.

CBC News has confirmed that editor Shawna Richer has been fired and that Jamie Irving is no longer the publisher of the paper. Earlier, their names had been removed from the paper's list of senior staff.

The apology, which ran on the provincial newspaper's front page on Tuesday, said the story that ran on July 8 that accused Harper of placing a communion wafer in his pocket was "inaccurate and should not have been published."

"There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now," the apology said.

"Our reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras, who wrote the story reporting on the funeral, did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote. In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them." (CBC News)

Let's still be clear, the Archbishop still shouldn't have given him Communion in the first place, he had no business accepting it, and the fact that the above story is headlined "Publisher, editor out over wafer story" tells you how far we still have to go when it comes to informed, respectful reporting of matters Catholic.