It is not surprising that such remarks [from Pope Francis] would be ignored, given the media’s high-priestly role within our “current Kingdom of Whatever,” to use Brad Gregory’s felicitous phrase, in which “men and women in larger numbers prioritize the fulfilment of their self-chosen, acquisitive, individual desires above any social (including familial) solidarities except those they also happen to choose, and only for as long as they happen to choose them.” By warning that any society that mistakes rights for competing individual interests and freedom for mere licence will inevitability descend into resentment and violence, Francis was effectively storming the West’s holy of holies, the sacred centre of liberalism as such. Far easier to grant blanket coverage the pope’s off the cuff “Who am I to judge?” remark, which poses no challenge whatsoever to the effete sensibilities of liberal individualism, than to wrestle with a thoroughgoing challenge to the sustainability of liberalism itself.
Nor is it surprising that the media would be drawn to a broad-brush characterisation of an ageing, listless Europe, made by a pope who has graced the cover of Rolling Stone, no less! Once again, this says rather more about the media’s slobbering servitude to “the new” – which cannot help but sneer at any tradition or institution or system of thought that does not melt away before the ineluctable demands of fashion and the fickle rule of individual choice – than it does about the pope’s open-handed invitation to join together “in building a Europe which revolves not around the economy, but around the sacredness of the human person, around inalienable values … a Europe which courageously embraces its past and confidently looks to its future in order fully to experience the hope of its present.”
On both counts, the media conceals its ignorance, its arrogance and its incurious disregard for whatever does not fit within its unavowed agenda behind the threadbare alibi that it is simply reporting what is newsworthy – as if that were an objective category which the media is duty bound to serve, and which it itself has no role in shaping.
Read it all.
Scott Stephens–Alone Together: Can Moral Reflection Survive in a Media Age? (I)
It is not surprising that such remarks [from Pope Francis] would be ignored, given the media’s high-priestly role within our “current Kingdom of Whatever,” to use Brad Gregory’s felicitous phrase, in which “men and women in larger numbers prioritize the fulfilment of their self-chosen, acquisitive, individual desires above any social (including familial) solidarities except those they also happen to choose, and only for as long as they happen to choose them.” By warning that any society that mistakes rights for competing individual interests and freedom for mere licence will inevitability descend into resentment and violence, Francis was effectively storming the West’s holy of holies, the sacred centre of liberalism as such. Far easier to grant blanket coverage the pope’s off the cuff “Who am I to judge?” remark, which poses no challenge whatsoever to the effete sensibilities of liberal individualism, than to wrestle with a thoroughgoing challenge to the sustainability of liberalism itself.
Nor is it surprising that the media would be drawn to a broad-brush characterisation of an ageing, listless Europe, made by a pope who has graced the cover of Rolling Stone, no less! Once again, this says rather more about the media’s slobbering servitude to “the new” – which cannot help but sneer at any tradition or institution or system of thought that does not melt away before the ineluctable demands of fashion and the fickle rule of individual choice – than it does about the pope’s open-handed invitation to join together “in building a Europe which revolves not around the economy, but around the sacredness of the human person, around inalienable values … a Europe which courageously embraces its past and confidently looks to its future in order fully to experience the hope of its present.”
On both counts, the media conceals its ignorance, its arrogance and its incurious disregard for whatever does not fit within its unavowed agenda behind the threadbare alibi that it is simply reporting what is newsworthy – as if that were an objective category which the media is duty bound to serve, and which it itself has no role in shaping.
Read it all.