Jul

25

Co-Workers of the Truth 7/25

Posted By reynor | Filed Under Co-Workers of the Truth, Pope Benedict XVI 

Benedict XVIThere is no such thing as a purely objective news report.  Even photography, in which the possibility of pure objectivity was apparently found in the exclusion of every trace of a representational subject, contains a modicum of interpretation even  if we leave out of consideration the manifold opportunitites it offers for manipulation. It is always, in one way or another, an arrangement of objects, a choice, an excerpt, an elucidation, and consequently an iterpretation. 

Our reporting always means a selecting.  Therefore every report is an interpretation, even if only because of what is not reported, what is not said.  But this means that the technology of reporting without the ethics of reporting is inhuman and we must ask ourselves if we have not become on the one hand, giants of technology, but on the other hand infants in the matter of ethics in general and of the ethics of reporting in particular. 

It is precisely in this context, I think, that the particular task of the Catholic news agency becomes clear.  Not only does it bring the vast realm of Church news into contact with the realm of human debate and make it comprehensible, but it exists precisely to develop and put into practice the ethics of reporting.

From: Ordinariatskorrespondenz, 11/15/1977

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