Media that focus on scandals and spread fake news to smear
politicians risk becoming like people who have a morbid fascination with
excrement, Pope Francis said in an interview published on Wednesday.
Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio that spreading
disinformation was “probably the greatest damage that the media can do”
and using communications for this rather than to educate the public
amounted to a sin.
Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media
risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and
consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.
The Argentine-born pontiff excused himself for using such terms in
order to get his point across while answering a question about the
correct use of the media.
“I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not
fall into — no offense intended — the sickness of coprophilia, that is,
always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they
are true,” he said.
“And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”
That section of the interview, all of which was distributed to
reporters in an Italian translation of the interview in the pope’s
native Spanish, contained some of the most blunt language the pontiff
has ever used about the media.
He also spoke of the danger of using the media to slander political rivals.
“The means of communication have their own temptations, they can be
tempted by slander, and therefore used to slander people, to smear them,
this above all in the world of politics,” he said. “They can be used as
means of defamation…”
“No one has a right to do this. It is a sin and it is hurtful,” he said.
He described disinformation as the greatest harm the media can do
because “it directs opinion in only one direction and omits the other
part of the truth,” he said.
The pope’s comments on disinformation followed widespread debate in
the United States over whether fake news on the internet might have
swayed voters toward Republican candidate Donald Trump. NY Post
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