From the National Catholic Reporter, regarding the Deal Hudson affair:

This past March 17, having paid tribute to the saint who drove the snakes from Ireland, George W. Bush — first lady to his left, Irish prime minister to his right — bounded off the Roosevelt Room podium. As he began to work the crowd of Irish Americans and Gaelic-wannabees, the president noticed a familiar face, a fellow Texan, among those assembled at the annual St. Patrick’s Day White House gathering.

“Immediately after George Bush spoke,” recalled former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn, “the first person he greeted was Deal Hudson.”

Heady stuff, perhaps, to be the first among the gathered Catholic glitterati to be singled out by the most powerful man in the world. But by now Hudson — publisher of the conservative Catholic monthly Crisis, Bush political operative, and one-time philosophy professor — was accustomed to the treatment.

Hudson, a 54-year-old, thrice-married former Baptist minister, is a regular White House visitor, a leading Bush campaign Catholic proxy, and a widely quoted partisan unafraid to use his pen to serve the Bush cause.

In more than two dozen interviews conducted by NCR over a four-and-a-half-month period, mostly with former friends and Hudson’s ideological kin, a complicated portrait emerged. Though few of those interviewed would speak on the record, many of them painted a far less flattering picture of Hudson than his public moralizing would suggest, and several raised questions about the allegations that ended his academic career.

Also check out The Revealer, which generally turns out good criticism of reporting at mainstream and niche press, left and right.

UPDATE: The National Catholic Reporter has just posted the article that sparked the Deal Hudson affair — even before it was published. Joe Feuerherd’s expose is what religion reporting should be: tough, theologically and politically informed, empathetic, and attuned to the intersections of faith and the world. Here’s why it matters to everyone, religious or not: “The perception that [Deal] Hudson controls Catholic access to the White House is widespread [and] largely accurate.”

This isn’t attack journalism. Writes Feuerherd: “In my 20 years as a writer and journalist I’ve written what could fairly be termed “favorable stories” about such conservative Catholics as Cardinal John O’Connor, Opus Dei’s Fr. C. John McCloskey, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Jim Towey, director of the Bush Administration Office of Faith Based Initiatives. The notion that this story was somehow politically motivated is incorrect. I went where the story led me. “

Cross posted at my blog.