Media and the Family: A Risk and a Richness
(Theme for the 38th World Communication Day – Ascension Sunday, May 23, 2004)
Communication can enrich lives
The media are welcomed daily as familiar guests in many families and homes, making communication the lead culture of society. Families throughout the world, our country included, have access in their own homes to the immense and varied media resources. They enjoy virtual unlimited opportunities for information, education, cultural expansion, and even spiritual growth. The Church recognizes this reality and recommends Media and the Family as the theme for the 38th World Communications Day (WCD).
How much use do families make of the media? How we families and family concerns treated by the media? The extraordinary growth of information technology and their increased availability bring exceptional opportunities for enriching people’s lives as individuals and as families. Yet the same media, Pope John Paul II pointed out, have also the capacity to do grave harm to families when they present an inadequate or even deformed outlook on life, on the family, on religion and on morality.
Moral dimension of communication
The Holy Father’s message for the 2004 World Communication Day reminds both communicator and receiver that all communication has a moral dimension. People can grow or diminish in moral stature by the words they speak and the message they choose to hear. And media has this great role to destroy or to build. Family life are frequently depicted in a sensitive manner, realistic but also sympathetic, that celebrates virtues like love, fidelity, forgiveness, and generous self giving. There are also media presentations which accentuate the failures and disappointments inevitably experienced by married couples and families. Some directors make an effort to distinguish true love from its counterfeits, and show the irreplaceable importance of the family as the fundamental unit of society. Yet family and family life are all too often inadequately portrayed. Infidelity, divorce, sexual activity outside marriage, abortion, homosexuality and the absence of a moral and spiritual vision of the marriage covenant are depicted uncritically.
Such portrayals, the Holy Father said, endanger the fundamental values of marriage and the family, and are detrimental to the good of society.
Responsibility of communicators
It takes true courage and a high sense of responsibility for professional communicators to know and respect the needs of the family, Pope Paul VI said in his message for the 1969 World Communications Day. It is not easy to resist commercial pressures or the demands of conformity to a secular ideologies. The stakes are very high, since every attack on he fundamental value of the family is an attack on the welfare of humanity.
Responsibility of parents
Parents must be the first to educate their children about the “moderate, critical, watchful and prudent use of the media” in the home (Familiaris Consortio, 76). Even very young children can be taught important lessons about the media: (a) – that these media are produced by people anxious to communicate messages; (b) – that these are often messages to do something: to buy a product, to engage in dubious behavior; that is not in the child’s best interests or in accord with moral truth; (c) – that children should not uncritically accept or imitate what they find in the media.
The Pope’s message offers practical guidelines on regulating the use of media in the home. This would include planning and scheduling media use, limiting the time children devote to media, making entertainment a family experience, putting some media entirely off limits, and periodically excluding all of them for the sake of other family activities. Above all, parents should give good example to children by their own thoughtful and selective use of media.
Pope John Paul II sends to the world the following wishes: May families be able always to find in the media a source of support, encouragement and inspirations as they strive to live as community of life and love, to train young people in sound moral values, and to advance a culture of solidarity, freedom and peace.