The cardinal rule.

I really don't have anything against the Village Voice. Like Woody Allen or West Forty-second Street, it's just there, an undeniable part of New York City life. Besides, I'm in favor of people reading. Who knows, maybe someday they'll pick up Commonweal. I will admit that the Voice's ad pages are a bit much for me: all that flesh. But I suppose Thomas Aquinas would argue there's a place for such things, given it's a fallen world.

And you don't have to buy it. I rarely have, except when a visitor was coming to town and needed to know about off-off-Broadway, or a friend was looking for an apartment. I do remember some good reports on the antiwar movement, the farm workers, and, more recently, the homeless in New York. And I recall meeting Vivian Gornick when she came to the Catholic Worker to interview Dorothy Day. The article she wrote was first-rate, and so was the photograph that accompanied it. And, of course, there is always Jules Feiffer.

So when the Voice called Commonweal recently and wanted some information about our position on welfare reform, I wasn't adverse to talking with a brother journalist. Commonweal had just completed its special February 24 issue on "Religion & the Media," where it was pointed out - among many other things - that there is a lot of ignorance among members of the media. Since one of the "spiritual works of mercy" is to instruct the ignorant, why not try?

So with modest brilliance (or was it abiding naivete?), I talked with the reporter. When asked why I thought the Catholic bishops weren't speaking out more on welfare reform, I told him I wasn't an expert on what the bishops were thinking or doing - half the time I'm not sure what I'm thinking or doing - and that he ought to call the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. I gave him the name of someone in the know. In response to further queries, I made some theoretical observations - a bad decision, it turns out - on why the bishops might not be taking on the Contract with America, point by point. I also faxed him Commonweal's editorials and several strong statements by the bishops and Catholic Charities on the welfare reform.

I didn't think what I had said could be gotten so very wrong.

But think again. When the quotes attributed to me appeared in the Voice's February 28 media column, they were used to bludgeon the bishops, particularly New York's Cardinal John O'Connor, for their tepid defense of the poor, especially unmarried women with children. And to demonstrate just how uninterested and unfeeling some of these prelates were, I was made to say that "there are some bishops who would not be concerned with cutting off benefits to unwed mothers."

I was soon on phone and fax, telling my brother journalist at the Voice that I had never said such a thing, in any voice; never thought it; and couldn't imagine a bishop saying it. In fact, just the opposite is true. "But that's what our notes say you said," the reporter reported in Orwellian parlance. So how could he retract what he said I said, if I said what I said in the notes? he said. Now I felt I was in a Feiffer cartoon.

After that conversation, I understood a little better how I had been misquoted. It seemed the Voice had been on a fishing expedition to get the cardinal. (In New York, it happens all the time. On March 18, the Times published a photograph of this year's Saint Patrick's Day Parade grand marshal, none other than Cardinal O'Connor. It was not a photo that would turn you green with envy. The cardinal looked like Drosselmeier from The Nutcracker ballet, his hands aflutter, his mouth contorted in what might be a Bronx cheer. Someone at the Times had to search hard to find that one on the proof sheets.)

But there are two other possible answers for why what I said was misconstrued, and I drink the second has such a commanding valence that in this case it easily intertwined with and overtook the first.

1. The Voice columnist genuinely wanted the bishops to speak out more forthrightly on behalf of the poor (although he seemed unaware that they had been doing so for years; perhaps the Voice had't covered it).

2. Even though the church may be one's best ally on a given issue - such as the one in question - its hierarchy is always fair game for criticism because of the church's teachings on sexuality. When it comes to belittling such beliefs, never a lick amiss.

Two issues later (March 14), the Voice did print my letter criticizing its faulty reporting, and followed it up with a reply from Richard Goldstein, author of the original column. "Jordan made his statements in an interview with the Voice," Goldstein wrote. "I am glad to have them clarified." But Goldstein is still not very clear. This Jordan never made the statement in question, period. The Voice will have to take full credit.

Even in opinion pieces, there is a cardinal rule in reporting: Get it right. It's a Sisyphean task in a fallen world, to be sure. But it's the only reason for a reporter to be out there every day in the first place.