The evening news—the one t.v. show I watch besides “60 Minutes,” detailed Pope Francis’s visit to the “Holy Land” (he’s actually in Jordan). Well, I suppose I could live with that, but what rankled a tad was a shot of Francis being driven to the Jordan River by King Abdullah II, and then standing there, head bowed and hands clasped, with the narration:

“The Pope prayed at the spot where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.”

Really? Shouldn’t there be an “allegedly” in there?

After all, this is the news. It’s as if a correspondent, standing in the North Woods, said, “It was near here that Paul Bunyan found the young Babe, the faithful blue ox that would become his faithful sidekick.”

It’s bizarre that someone like the Tsarnaev brothers must (and rightly so) be described as “alleged killers” before conviction, while the news casts no doubt on the historicity of a 2000-year-old book of fiction. It’s 2014, and time for reputable news organizations to stop treating myths as if they were true.