“One of the mistakes of secularists is not to understand the character of what blasphemy feels to someone who is a realist in their religious beliefs…Religion as it is lived is not simply about a kind of interplay of propositions , two plus two equals four versus two plus two equals five. It is a felt experience with a big emotional charge.”

On Monday, November 12, Mark Thompson took over as the new President and CEO of The New York Times. Thompson is a practicing Catholic who believes “that the truths of the Christian faith are objective truths, rather than being entirely subjective.”

The position is primarily focused on running the business aspects of the Times. Thompson turned the British Broadcasting Company into a global online media powerhouse, and the Times management feels that he could do the same here.

The New York Times Company announced on August 14th that Thompson would become its new President and CEO. Thompson left the position as director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation on Friday, September 14th. Times Company’s chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told analysts last month that Mr. Thompson “possesses high ethical standards, and is the ideal person to lead our company.” However, questions about Thompson’s ethics arose in October.

Soon after, Thompson left the BBC, a scandal broke out over how the British media enterprise had handled charges of pedophilia made against Jimmy Savile, one of its most famous show hosts in an earlier era. Thompson says that he did not know specifically how BBC news was handling the Savile scandal, though he was told that a program exposing Savile was shelved shortly before his media enterprise ran a celebratory program about Sevile. At the Times journalists say that they will ask Thompson if he did all he could to get to the bottom of the Savile affair. Did he live up to his Catholic ethics to protect the vulnerable? Or did he stick his head in the sand?

Thompson has also faced questions about his editorial sensibility in regard to religion reporting. In 2005 BBC aired a controversial program “Jerry “Springer: the Opera” which contains some satire against Christianity. Last spring, Thompson talked with Oxford University professor Timothy Garton Ash about the role of his Catholic faith in journalism. Below are some of the most interesting points and the full interview in the video provided by Ash’s organization freespeechdebate.com.

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