The message of Pope Benedict XVI for the 42nd World Day of Communications which will take place on May 4, 2008 carries the theme: “The Media: At the Crossroads Between Self-Promotion and Service. Searching for the Truth In Order to Share It with Others.”
In his message, the Pope recognizes the many good that communications media are doing for individuals, society and the world at large. It is a fact known to all that media have become an integral part of the various aspects of human life: individual, family, social, political, economic, education, medicine, religion and so on. In many instances media are being used as instruments to promote greater justice, solidarity and peace. Media are good agents spread literacy, information, knowledge of facts, interpersonal and social relationships, dialogue, promotion of human life and human dignity, protection of environment.
Unfortunately, however, the Pope also noted how media are many times deviating from their positive role in society. They are being torn between two opposite challenges: that of giving service to people and that of self-promotion and self-service. Quoting from the Pope’s message:”… they risk being transformed into systems aimed at subjecting humanity to agendas dictated by the dominant interests of the day. This is what happenswhen communication is used for ideological purposes or for aggressive advertising of consumer products. While claiming to represent reality, it can tend to legitimize or impose distorted models of personal, family or social life. Moreover, in order to attract listeners and increase the size of audiences, it does not hesitate at times to have recourse to vulgarity and violence, and to overstep the mark.”
More often than not people of developing countries are the unfortunate prey of the negative use of media. Many think media is everything and is the best model and guide. It is the media which dictate what people should think, wear, eat and even what communal action to take. The media “creates events”, according to the Pope, instead of reporting the information truthfully.
We are also aware that many negative information are learned from the media. Violence and pornography abound in printed matters, movies, television, the internet and in other new instruments of information and entertainment. And it seems that those responsible for promoting a just and peaceful world are at a loss on what antidote to give to cure the ills which the negative media have given to the family and society.
“The media,” the Pope says, “must avoid becoming spokesmen for economic materialism and ethical relativism, true scourges of our time. Instead, they can and must contribute to making known the truth about humanity, and defending it against those who tend to deny or destroy it… Utilizing for this purpose the many refined and engaging techniques that the media have at their disposal is an exciting task, entrusted in the first place to managers and operators in the sector. Yet it is a task which to some degree concerns us all, because we are all consumers and operators of social communications in this era of globalization. The new media-telecommunications and internet in particular are changing the very face of communication; perhaps this is a valuable opportunity to reshape it, to make more visible, as my venerable predecessor Pope John Paull II said, the essential and indispensable elements of the truth about the human person (cf. Apostolic Letter The Rapid Development, 10).
To this effect, the Holy Father is proposing, in his message, the creation of an “Info-Ethics” for social communications, just as there is bioethics for medicine and scientific researches for the promotion of human life. This info-ethics will serve as guide to media pratitioners in the choice of the kind of knowledge, ideas, information and images they have to feed the public and at the same time can help the consumers to choose what media programs to patronize.