Part five: A modest writer battered in a David and Goliath face-off. Goliath is angry

Catholic corruption enabling defamation in some media claims? Judge for yourself

Why was Alabama-based “global Catholic network” EWTN so adamant against redressing that it had allowed Catholic historian James Hitchcock, Ph.D., to promote his now-declared defamatory book over its airwaves that falsely attacked me repeatedly? Was this decision taken in EWTN’s executive suite? Did these executives, like some other institutions’, stray from their co-workers’ ideals? New Jersey’s Transaction Publishers and then London-based international publishing house Taylor & Francis issued the book in 2016-2017. EWTN was among the salesmen.

News organizations routinely run corrections. If they make a serious error, they shouldn’t say quietly to themselves, “That was a mistake, but we’ll never admit this to our audience.” In my second installment of this series, posted April 2, 2022, I noted that I once had called an indisputable error to the attention of The New York Times, which quickly ran a correction. The Times’ obituary of former abortion crusader turned pro-lifer Bernard Nathanson, M.D., said his book Aborting America had been issued by a minor house — but it actually was deemed worthy of release by the major firm Doubleday, two years earlier than stated. The error had nothing to do with this Hitchcock situation, but this powerful newspaper acknowledged and rectified its 2011 obituary mistake, without delay or pushback once I contacted it.

I actually had hesitated to contact the lofty Times, but a New York friend encouraged me, and he was right to do so.

Later in the decade, EWTN did two entire programs promoting James Hitchcock’s Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics. EWTN President Doug Keck hosted one of them, its “Bookmark” program. Keck began by describing Hitchcock as “an old friend of EWTN” whose book was available through the EWTN catalogue. Keck shook hands with Hitchcock, noted that the author’s late wife, Helen, had been a board member of EWTN, and said this couple had “zeal for the Catholic faith.” It was a chummy interview. He was a pal of EWTN, a status that I did not share in.

Hitchcock said he was a regular reader of the liberal National Catholic Reporter and also of the conservative national paper that I wrote for, The Wanderer. Keck took care to point out that the National Catholic Reporter is “not our paper.” That was the EWTN-owned National Catholic Register. That was an offhand acknowledgement of EWTN’s involvement in Catholic newspapering. EWTN’s Register thus was a competitor with the two Catholic-themed newspapers Hitchcock attacked in his book. EWTN Chairman of the Board and CEO Michael Warsaw is the Register publisher. (Mighty EWTN also owns the Catholic News Agency.)

Hitchcock told Keck that because he regularly read the Reporter and Wanderer, he already had most of his material for a book, which wouldn’t take that long to write. Hitchcock didn’t explain how he compiled his material (peppered with serious falsehoods against me). Indeed, as I write this on April 30, 2022, Hitchcock never even has acknowledged, much less explained to me, how he came to write any of his errors in a book first published in late 2016.

In this interview, Keck said the Democrat Hitchcock first voted for a Republican in 1976. Hitchcock replied that he forgot which year it was. Maybe it was 1980, “an off-year election,” Hitchcock said, making an obvious error. Keck jumped in to correct him, saying that maybe 1978 was the off-year Hitchcock meant because 1980 was the year of Ronald Reagan’s presidential election. (As any historian might recall.)

Keck and Hitchcock each had a copy of the book on the table before them. Keck said, “A very interesting read available through the EWTN religious catalogue, ewtnRC.com. Check it out.”

EWTN’s advance promotion for this program described Hitchcock as a “master historian and darn good storyteller” who “enthralls us” with his book. Sounds like a pretty strong recommendation to readers by the “global Catholic network” itself that they could count on the accuracy of what Hitchcock claimed. Keck didn’t reply to my two certified letters to him.

As I noted in my last installment, EWTN is a massive operation in the world of Catholic enterprise. A link to its sales of religious goods proclaims, “World’s #1 Catholic Store.”

I’m one very modest writer in a two-bedroom condo, with no television or radio networks at my command, or news services or newspapers under my control, or religious goods sales proclaiming to be World’s #1. Yet my requesting to bring my accurate side of the story to a public about a highly misleading book that EWTN heartily promoted was met with EWTN responses including legalism, deception and threat. If this was Catholic good manners, I’d hate to see its ill will.

Neither EWTN nor Hitchcock ever has demonstrated that his falsehoods were instead accurate, nor that I was mistaken in my claims of his serious errors.

Even if EWTN hadn’t done its due diligence and had put Hitchcock on the air without knowing of the criticisms that I had published hardcopy and posted online, it still could have simply announced that new information now had come to its attention that it wished to share with its audience, and allowed me to inform them.

In early 2018, I mailed EWTN a total of eight certified letters to four different people, CEO Michael Warsaw, interviewer Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., producer Jason Addington, and Keck. Only Warsaw replied, only once, as I always have written. He brushed off my request to bring correct information to his audiences. Even though I’d told Warsaw from the very first that I’d already contacted Hitchcock and his publisher, Warsaw didn’t acknowledge any responsibility for EWTN to rectify having promoted the book. He said on Feb. 8, 2018, that “the relief you are seeking must be sought from the publisher.” He added that Fr. Pacwa’s Jan. 3, 2018, hour-long interview with Hitchcock “is not scheduled to be aired again.” (I didn’t yet know of Keck’s separate interview, but when I wrote to Warsaw about it on March 20, 2018, Warsaw didn’t reply.) One must ask: if Pacwa’s interview wouldn’t air again, why? Serious error? If the error was that serious, why wasn’t it worth mentioning to the audience that had been misled?

Please forgive me if this history is tedious, but it’s only a fraction of what has occurred over nearly five years with people who, it seems to me, regard themselves as being completely beyond apology or correction. And in the name of Catholicism.

A bit over two years went by. As I said in my previous Substack installment, posted on April 21, I learned that Leslie Anne Rabbitt, EWTN’s manager of “Advancement Services,” sent an email to a man on May 8, 2020, who had complained of its mistreatment of me. Rabbitt replied with various misstatements, including that Warsaw wrote me “a very cordial letter” that “directly addressed [my] concerns” and explained that I had no dispute with EWTN. She claimed Warsaw told me that “the interviews,” plural, with Pacwa and Keck wouldn’t run again — which Warsaw did not say. She did not even get the time of the year correct, claiming that his Feb. 8 letter was written on June 8.

I replied with a 20-paragraph email to Rabbitt on May 16, 2020, that concluded, “I expect serious redress of EWTN's direct culpability here, not a brush-off. I am not dropping this matter.” She didn’t answer. Instead, a person I had not heard of before, EWTN attorney John Manos — whose title was given as “vice president and general counsel, corporate secretary” — jumped in to demonstrate that he, too, didn’t comprehend this situation. Manos started off by ripping into me because, he said, I had lied and claimed that EWTN never replied to me. “That allegation is not only serious, but that allegation is far worse because it is untrue,” Manos said in boldfaced italics. He proceeded to condemn “[t]he falsity of your serious allegation” and he wrote, with underlining and boldface for emphasis: “EWTN very timely replied to your concerns.  It also took action appropriate to what occurred.”

Manos railed about my supposed “false implication” and said, “You told donors to EWTN that EWTN did not respond to you. That is false. [Emphasis in the original.] Now, below, you explain that EWTN did not do what you want. It is your opinion instead that EWTN’s ‘response is quite insufficient’.”

(Interesting that Manos was sensitive to the idea I had contacted EWTN donors. In fact, I didn’t seek out or try to identify EWTN donors. If its donors happened to be among people who became aware of this situation, I hadn’t sought them.)

Manos, so emphatic to claim inaccurately that I said EWTN never sent me any reply, then made an entirely inaccurate claim about Warsaw’s sole letter to me of Feb. 8, 2018. Manos wrote: “Mr. Warsaw, in his reply to you, stated that his letter was in reply to you on his behalf and on behalf of the several other people at EWTN you contacted.”

Apparently this was EWTN’s attempt to absolve anyone else of having to answer certified mail I sent individually to the three of them.

But no indeed, Warsaw never wrote to me that his reply was “on behalf of the several other people at EWTN you contacted.” Presumably Manos had a copy of Warsaw’s letter in front of his face (I have the original Warsaw letter right here, next to my keyboard), but Manos was unreliable like author James Hitchcock in stating what he read. The “global Catholic” EWTN’s “vice president and general counsel” continued: “I am stating with this email, that I am replying on behalf of everyone at EWTN to whom you have been sending these emails and letters. Consider this a cumulative reply to all of it. From this point forward, cease alleging falsely to others that you have not been adequately heard or responded to by EWTN or anyone at EWTN.”

He seems good at giving orders to someone who never heard of him before. Not so good at the requirements of the moment, like Christian contrition, humility or charity.

Manos wrote, “EWTN cannot step into the shoes of the author or the book publisher.” He insisted there was no duty for EWTN to do anything more than it had done. He concluded, “Mr. Duggan, I am not asking you to drop the matter you have with the author and publisher, but I am asking you to be accurate in the things you say about EWTN and stop making false allegations about it. I am also asking you to stop imputing the duties of the book publisher and author to EWTN.”

I replied to Manos later the same day, May 18, 2020, to point out that my 20-paragraph email to Rabbitt — which she failed to answer but he replied to — included a link to a June 22, 2018, online article I wrote about Hitchcock’s book that plainly said this in the fifth paragraph: “After I brought some of the serious errors of James Hitchcock, Ph.D., to the attention of EWTN chairman Michael Warsaw, Warsaw replied to me that Hitchcock’s hour-long interview with Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., would not be rebroadcast. However, Warsaw didn’t grant my repeated requests for my own interview time on his network to alert its many followers to how Hitchcock’s book misleads."

Manos replied on May 19, 2020, to thank me for this link, but, he said, “it does not seem responsive to the situation.” He also said he found himself “repeatedly in the position of rehashing this matter in response to the same query” from different people — although, he said, they believed EWTN had not written me at all, not even Warsaw’s one letter.

So the word was getting out. But what was Manos replying to them? The same serious inaccuracies he tried to use on me?

There ya go. Manos pounded the table over my allegedly saying EWTN never responded. When I showed him evidence to the contrary, he said it didn’t seem responsive. So on May 20, 2020, I sent him a link to a second Arizona Daily Independent article I had written, which had been posted online on June 2, 2019. It plainly said: “I mailed a total of eight certified letters to EWTN personnel, including four to EWTN Chairman and CEO Michael Warsaw. Only one letter brought a reply. Warsaw told me that Hitchcock’s hour-long interview with Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., would not be rebroadcast. However, neither Warsaw, EWTN President Doug Keck, Pacwa, nor producer Jason Addington replied to my repeated requests to come on the air for corrections. Hitchcock’s deceptions remained on the record.”

I proceeded to quote to Manos the national conservative commentator Quin Hillyer posting on June 2, 2019, lauding my accuracy as he introduced an article I wrote for his blog about the Hitchcock situation, which included EWTN: “The following column is by a superb reporter of my acquaintance, Dexter Duggan, who for years has been calling me for quotes for well-researched articles of his at the Catholic publication The Wanderer. Every time I have dealt with Duggan, he has been meticulously thorough and careful, and I trust him always to get both my words and my context correct.”

I commented to Manos: “Mr. Hillyer is non-Catholic, but he showed more concern for restoring my reputation from Dr. Hitchcock's defamatory book than you Catholics at EWTN do.” I continued, “As long as I am accurate — unlike Dr. Hitchcock — I am completely free to continue informing readers or viewers about his serious inaccuracy, including his having been assisted by EWTN in spreading it. 

“EWTN rightly should feel embarrassed and defensive about its behavior in this situation,” I said. “Your attempts to make me feel defensive only exacerbate this situation when you should be making it better by showing some Christian contrition.”

Manos didn’t reply. When Catholic blogger Mary Ann Kreitzer, president of the Catholic Media Coalition, strongly wrote to Manos in my defense, he didn’t reply, either. Manos seemed very emphatic at pounding the table until he was shown contrary evidence. Then the “global Catholic” vice president and general counsel fell silent. Not a whisper of apology.

On May 28, 2020, Kreitzer wrote to Manos that “I’ve read numerous of his [Duggan’s] articles and they are all crystal clear about EWTN’s response.” She wrote that EWTN “participated in promoting a slanderous book filled with mistakes, untruths, and, perhaps, deliberate lies. I have no idea what got into James Hitchcock, a man I previously admired, when he targeted Dexter and The Wanderer. His slipshod work certainly damages his reputation as a reputable historian. EWTN’s reputation as a reputable Catholic source for the truth has also been secondarily damaged by Hitchcock. Meanwhile, many colleges who may have been influenced by EWTN’s promotion of the Hitchcock book to purchase it for their libraries are helping to advance the slander…

“Everyone at EWTN should be ashamed over their failure to help restore Dexter Duggan’s good name,” Kreitzer wrote. “I suspect if a similar situation happened to you, Mr. Manos, or any of your colleagues at EWTN, you would be quick to seek redress.”

In December of 2020 my own attorney wrote to Warsaw, with a copy to Manos. Neither of them replied, except for Manos to tell my attorney to write just to him, not to Warsaw. Perhaps the next installment of this that I write will conclude the matter. Or not?