ROME — Pope Francis told journalists and professional communicators Monday that listening to all voices is essential in order to provide “solid, balanced, and complete information.”
Listening is “the first indispensable ingredient of dialogue and good communication,” the pontiff said in his yearly message for the World Day of Social Communications.
“Communication does not take place if listening has not taken place, and there is no good journalism without the ability to listen,” he declared. “In order to provide solid, balanced, and complete information, it is necessary to listen for a long time.”
“To recount an event or describe an experience in news reporting, it is essential to know how to listen, to be ready to change one’s mind, to modify one’s initial assumptions,” the pope added.
“It is only by putting aside monologues that the harmony of voices that is the guarantee of true communication can be achieved,” he said. “Listening to several sources, ‘not stopping at the first tavern’ — as the experts in the field teach us — ensures the reliability and seriousness of the information we transmit.”
Pope Francis appealed to Christians on Sunday to avoid gossiping about others, which he called “a plague worse than COVID.” https://t.co/63Apk61BjF
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 6, 2020
In his message, Francis also warned against excluding uncomfortable opinions and seeking a “consensus” rather than the truth.
“The lack of listening, which we experience so often in daily life, is unfortunately also evident in public life, where, instead of listening to each other, we often ‘talk past one another,’” he said. “This is a symptom of the fact that, rather than seeking the true and the good, consensus is sought; rather than listening, one pays attention to the audience.”
During the coronavirus pandemic so much “previously accumulated mistrust towards ‘official information’ has also caused an ‘infodemic,’ within which the world of information is increasingly struggling to be credible and transparent,” Francis noted. “We need to lend an ear and listen profoundly, especially to the social unease heightened by the downturn or cessation of many economic activities.”
Good communication, he said, “does not try to impress the public with a soundbite, with the aim of ridiculing the other person, but pays attention to the reasons of the other person and tries to grasp the complexity of reality.”
Pope Francis underscored Christianity’s entrepreneurial character Sunday, insisting that good Christians are those who generously take risks and put their talents to work. https://t.co/d4uDWUhAPn
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 15, 2020
In reality, “in many dialogues we do not communicate at all,” the pope stated. “We are simply waiting for the other person to finish speaking in order to impose our point of view,” a phenomenon that results in “a monologue in two voices.”
Francis also warned against “eavesdropping,” which is a corruption of true listening.
“There is a kind of hearing that is not really listening, but its opposite: eavesdropping,” he said. “In fact, eavesdropping and spying, exploiting others for our own interests, is an ever-present temptation that nowadays seems to have become more acute in the age of social networks.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.