c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican described the mass media Tuesday (May 30) as tools for both “great good and great evil” and attacked those who misuse communications technology for economic exploitation, political demagoguery and cultural domination.

In a 40-page document, “Ethics in Communications,” the Pontifical Council for Social Communications also advised Roman Catholic leaders to be “honest and straightforward in their relations with journalists” even when asked “seemingly awkward questions.”

The council issued the document in advance of a four-day Jubilee for Journalists opening Thursday (June 1). It will include a worldwide video conference with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state,

a Mass in St. Peter’s Square and an audience with Pope John Paul II.

Archbishop John P. Foley, president of the council, told a Vatican news conference that organizers had expected about 800 journalists to come to Rome for Holy Year celebration, but instead some 7,000 journalists from more than 50 countries have signed up.

The council, which previously published a document on “Ethics in Advertising,” said rapid technological change is making the communications media ever “more pervasive and powerful.”

But, it said, the media in themselves are neutral. What is important is how people use them.

“Great good and great evil come from the use people make of the media of social communications,” it said. “People choose whether to use the media for good or evil ends, in a good or evil way.”

The document cited the media’s “indispensable role in a market economy,” its function in “facilitating informed citizen participation in the political process” and its contributions to the transmission of culture, education and religion.

At the same time, it said, the media often presents “what is base and degrading in a glamorous light while ignoring or belittling what uplifts and ennobles,” fosters “trivialization and banality” and re-enforces “stereotyping _ based on race and ethnicity, sex and age and other factors, including religion.”

In the sphere of economics, the document said, the media “sometimes are used to build and sustain economic systems that serve acquisitiveness and greed.” Neoliberalism, “based on a purely economic conception of man,” is just such a system, it said.

The council took issue with the view that it is the job of journalists to simply “report things as they are.”

“That undoubtedly is their job,” it said. “But some instances of human suffering are largely ignored by media even as others are reported; and insofar as this reflects a decision by communicators, it reflects indefensible selectivity.

“Even more fundamentally, communication structures and policies and the allocation of technology are factors helping to make some people `information rich’ and others `information poor’ at a time when prosperity, and even survival, depend on information,” it said.

“In such ways, then, media often contribute to the injustices and imbalances that give rise to suffering they report.”

Foley criticized communications monopolies in the United States and Europe. While the BBC and CNN “do wonderful work,” he said, the BBC is focusing at present on the conflict in Sierra Leone because British troops are there, just as CNN did on Kosovo when U.S. troops were there, but neither reports on the bloodshed in Angola.

“People should be able to receive news not just where there are vested interests,” he said.

The council also attacked political leaders’ manipulation of public opinion “even in countries with democratic systems.”

“Unscrupulous politicians use media for demagoguery and deception in support of unjust policies and oppressive regimes,” it said. “They misrepresent opponents and systematically distort and suppress the truth by propaganda and spin.”

Foley said that since the deregulation of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States there is a tendency for politicians to award control of radio and television broadcasting “not for the public benefit but to those who help them win re-election.”

The document also accused the media of participating in a “conspiracy against life” by presenting opponents of contraception, sterilization, abortion and euthanasia as”enemies of freedom and progress.”

It said the news media “avoid or oversimplify” complex issues, and the entertainment media “feature presentations of a corrupting, dehumanizing kind, including exploitative treatments of sexuality and violence.”

“On the international level, cultural domination imposed through the means of social communication also is a serious growing problem,” the council said.

“That so much communication now flows in one direction only _ from developed nations to the developing and the poor _ raises serious ethical questions,” it said. “Have the rich nothing to learn from the poor? Are the powerful deaf to the voices of the weak?”

The media also ignore “religious ideas and experiences,” marginalize them or treat them with ignorance, contempt or “as an object of curiosity that does not merit serious attention,” the council said.

Nevertheless, it said, “those who represent the church must be honest and straightforward in their relations with journalists. Even though the questions they ask are sometimes embarrassing or disappointing, especially when they in no way correspond to the message we have to get across, one must bear in mind that these disconcerting questions are often asked by most of our contemporaries.

“For the church to speak credibly to people today, those who speak for her have to give credible, truthful answers to these seemingly awkward questions.”

DEA END POLK