Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
The email correspondence of Los Angeles' Roman Catholic cardinal as he struggled to contain a scandal over child-molesting priests was broadcast across the city after copies of his correspondence was leaked to radio station KFI-AM's popular talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou. "The correspondence paints a portrait of church officials scrambling to stem the tide of a public relations nightmare and carefully doling out tidbits of information to detectives investigating possible child abuse. ... Kobylt and Chiampou obtained the e-mails from an anonymous source just hours before they began their afternoon show on Thursday and began reading from them over the air, until frantic church lawyers called demanding that they stop." The radio hosts responded by taunting the church's lawyers, asking if they "had ever responded that quickly to molestation victims."