MEDIA-INDIA: Catholic Church Pays Attention to Media Power

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Frederick Noronha

GOA, Jul 10 1998 (IPS) - Teachers and members of the Catholic church, sit around a room here in coastal India, grappling with a reality they were hardly aware of earlier — the influence and clout of the media today.

“The mass media has enormous power,” Peter Gonsalves, patiently explains, as he leads his unusual class with exercises and examples, of who controls the news, which news gets prominence, and slants in news reporting.

This youthful-looking Catholic priest of the Salesian religious order, is director of ‘Tej-Prasarni’, a media research and education organisation based in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, further up the western coast from Goa.

With 58 dailies published from the city, in eight different languages, Mumbai, previously called Bombay, is ideal for Gonsalves’ purposes. He says his media-education programmes satisfy a changing perception of the media in the Church.

Earlier, the Church dealt with the media with caution and distrust. Now, instead of alarm at the role of the media, there is also an attempt to understand how it works, and why it functions in the way it does.

Among the participants at the workshop in Panjim, in Catholic- majority Goa, were some 12 priests and nuns, some of whom are also teachers, and two housewives. The rest were all lay schoolteachers.

To make his point, Gonsalves selects two reports from different newspapers to show how differently they have been handled. One is overtly critical of the government, while the other tactfully avoids blaming the official side.

“Editors receive plenty of news from different sources, but not everything they receive appears on their news pages. They are selective in the presentation of news,” he tells his students. The rich and the famous, apart from public personalities, usually inherit the headlines, he points out.

The large majority of India’s people never feature in the news. This happens because of their disadvantaged status, or even inability because of illiteracy, to put their opinions in writing.

People also often don’t make it to the news simply because of their remoteness from areas accessible to reporters, or because their views are not popular or sensational, says Gonsalves.

Each media-education workshops generally runs for four days during which the group runs through a gamut of issues including biases in communications, stereotypes in the advertising world, or understanding pop music.

“At the turn of the 20th century, we have come to recognise three very important facts about the mass media. The mass media have enormous power. The mass media thrive on the insecurities of the young. The media set the trend,” he asserts.

The students seem satisfied. “This course gave me a deeper insight into the media and communication, and how important perception is to communication,” said a young Indian Redemptorist priest who did not want to be named.

“It made us critically aware of the media. They brainwash people who don’t think. But instead of merely grumbling against the negative aspects of the media, we need to see how it can be made to do something positive,” he added.

Gonsalves would like to spread his message among school and college teachers, apart from those in youth-centres. “A media- education teacher should be media-alert,” he says.

Youngsters need to understand and critique “fan-culture”. Why do people “lose their heads” over a pop hero? Can unbridled fan culture take an unhealthy turn? Does a low self-esteem make one identify with stars?

Unlike in the West, in India songs are linked to films. Much of the fan culture is directed to film-stars rather than playback singers. Often, a film in India is famous because of its songs.

Says prominent media analyst Dr. Keval Kumar in Pune, western Indian: “Participants in media education exercises must learn strategies for not only understanding the media but also how to talk back to the media, so as to make them more responsible and accountable to society.”

Media education is being promoted by others too. Two years ago, a magazine called ‘Media Matters’ was launched, to offer media education and interestingly, it is also closely affiliated to the Catholic Church.

Catholic priests and nuns have traditionally been associated with education in India, running schools, hospitals and charities or maintaining parishes. But, of late, some have shifted into new roles, such as functioning as lawyers to protect rights of the poor, leaders of fisher communities, or even media education.

India has 18.8 million Christians who comprise 2.3 percent of the population. Most Catholics are concentrated on the west coast, in the states of Kerala, Goa and Maharashtra. Goa, a former Portuguese colony, was during its colonial past an important centre for the spread of Christianity in Asia.