Sangkusing

(*As national director of mass media of the Philippine hierarchy, Fr. James Reuter’s mandate was expanded to include the entire Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, thus, making him the Church’s all-around media expert.)

This communication is the result of a breakdown to communications.  Owing to the disabilities to which the Roman postal service has for some time been subject, Father Reuter* and I were unable to exchange the necessary information regarding my attendance at this Assembly in time for me to attend it.  All I can do, therefore, is to send in this submission through the courtesy of Father Tucci, along with my best wishes for the success of the Assembly.  It is a very sketchy submission, hastily written to raise a few questions on the relationship between the mass media and the process of development.  Since they are question born of ignorance and hence more likely to confuse than to clarify issues, more likely to infuriate than to inform, it may be just as well that I am compelled to raise them from a distance. 

As Catholic broadcasters, you are of course aware that this is the centenary year of the birth of that remarkable Catholic journalist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1974).  It will thus be appropriate, and may even be entertaining to recall a piece “On Broadcasting” which he wrote in the 1920’s for the Illustrated London News. 

The tenor of G.K.’s remarks is that this new-fangled instrument called the radio may possibly be useful to the aged and infirm, but bids fair to be a menace to those who are neither.  He recommends that the radio receivers be distributed as an act of charity to the immobilized – the sick in hospitals, crippled old ladies crouched by the fireside – but strictly forbidden to anyone who can walk.

I suggest [he says] that a really sane society will not further extend these extended communications, but rather restrict them.  It will restrict them to those who would really be much better without them; even if they were only better for the exercise of walking down the road.  If they will not take the trouble to hear their own favourite public orator, I really cannot see why the public orator should come to them.

The reason he gives is characteristic of the democrat he was.  You cannot argue with a disembodied voice, and the whole point of a public meeting is for the public to be able to discuss with, and if necessary demolish, the public orator. Hence, “listening in” on public orators is not only an exercise in futility; if generally practiced, it can be destructive of democracy.

Many a politician will be all the safer when nobody can see his ugly face or criticize his shallow or shifty manners.  The real objection to listening-in is that you cannot, however deep and earnest be your desire, tear a politician to pieces.  But nobody; in any case, could expect the aged and infirm to join in the happy and youthful sport of tearing him to pieces.  It is not a suitable game of invalids in hospitals or old women seated by the fireside; and if they enjoy the beautiful illusion of supporting that they will learn something about politics by listening to political speeches, why should we not leave them their innocent dreams?

As for ”the more intelligent invalids, the more sensible old women, who wish to listen to good music, or even to bad,” G.K. generously concedes that they “have obviously a claim on all Christian people to help them in their helplessness.”  Let them, by all means, have this electronic hearing aid.   But why should we encourage healthy people to sprawl supinely beside a “squawkbox” and “listen-in” on a concert, a play, or a ball game when they are able to perfectly walk to the thing itself?

The athletic young man ought really to be ashamed to sit at home and listen to a concert  when he has only to walk down the street to find it.  He ought to be more ashamed to enjoy only half a play, when by walking out of the house he could enjoy the whole play. Such people are often criticized if they merely look on at athletic sports.  They ought to surely be more criticized if they only listen-in, because they are not even athletic enough to look on.

Of course, television has somehow weakened the force of G.K.’s thesis.  It is now possible not only to “listen-in” on the ball game but to see it, and to scrutinize the particular play – in a slow-motion reprise – whereby “we waz robbed” of a well earned victory for the home team by a stupid umpire’s decision.  It is now possible not only to hear the politician, but “to see his ugly face” and “criticize his shallow and shifty manners.”  It is even possible to talk back to him, thanks to Gallup polls and audience-reaction systems.

Moreover, it must be recognized that the mass media have advanced significantly beyond the point where they were in the 1920’s.  For G.K.’s generation they were merely reproductive media, and not very good ones at that. There may be senior citizens in this assembly who remember twiddling the knobs of the crystal set in the vain hope of getting Beethoven’s Eroie on the earphones, faintly played on a phonograph with a scratchy needle, between deafening bursts of static.  But it is so no longer.  Today, even babies born without silver spoons in their mouths are likely to have, beside the milk bottle just out of reach, a small transistor softly playing a lullaby.

    

The point, however, is that the electronic media have not only achieved a high level of technological perfection as instruments of transmittal or reproduction at a distance; they have become art forms in their own right.  I mean by this that media today do not merely bring happenings to those who cannot “walk” to them; they have become happenings in themselves, worthy of being “listened-in” to or viewed for their own sake.  The radio or television drama, interview or commercial is no longer the mere transmittal to the aged and infirm of a stage play, a political rally, or a full-page ad in the Sunday Times.  It has acquired a personality all its own.  It has become, by itself and in itself, for all alike, the able as well as the disabled, not just a conveyor belt but a new creation: an autonomous source of information, appreciation, interpretation, persuasion or oppression.

Did I say oppression?  I did.  To add that jarring note to an admiring catalogue of virtues was the quickest way I could think of to get to the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is this.  We have come to realize in recent years that the development of people is not just growth.  It is liberation.  Its compatible image is not the ripening of fruit.  It is the prison break: the smashing of chains, the breaking down of walls.  And it is becoming more and more evident that among the chains and walls that constrain the human spirit, in the developed no less that in the underdeveloped world, the mass media are by no means the least effective.  They are no longer the crutch, as in Chesterton’s time.  They are a menace.

The electronic sound and/or image has become not only an art form but an industry.  And an industry in any language, be it Marxist, Maoist, or Keynesian, means power.  And power corrupts.  Not always, of course.  But surely we must listen to the increasing number of voices being raised today – in the Third World, yes, but also in Europe and North America – against the massive power of the sound-and-image industries to condition not only public opinion but private thought: to promote the ideals of a wasteful consumer society, to alienate a people from their own inherited culture, to reconcile the economically and politically enslaved to the state pf slavery.  And surely it must say something to us that when a repressive regime takes over government, its first move is to secure, not the halls of congress, but the radio station.

Several questions arise.

In those underdeveloped countries where the Catholic mass media are still allowed to operate with relative freedom, how can they program their offerings to promote development-as-liberation: the formation of self-reliant who think for themselves on public issues according to the value system of their own culture, as illumined and enriched by the Gospel?

How, in these countries of relative freedom, can the Catholic mass media counteract the unduly conditioning effect of their industrialized and secularized counterparts?  By persuasion?  By infiltration?  By confrontation?

And in those underdeveloped countries where the Catholic mass media have been denied the freedom to operate according to conscience, as part of a general deprivation of human rights to secure an authoritarian government in power, we must ask the Lenin question:  What is to be done?  As well as the Arrupe question:  How to do?

Finally: how can Catholics, Christians, and all other men and women of good will, in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds, collaborate effectively to make mass media not a menace to freedom but a movement towards it?  Having asked which, I now slink off to a more restful conference on a much less thorny subject: the constitutions bequeathed by an obscure Basque named Iñigo de Loyola to an equally obscure multinational company called the Company of Jesus.

FAST FORWARD TO THE READER: “HE AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET. WE NOW HAVE SOCIAL MEDIA, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, TROLLS, YELLOWS, FAKE NEWS, ETC.  And the failure of Philippine leaders and institutions to abide by their Constitutional mandates, replacing them with self-interest and impunity.”