Rowan Williams on media

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a profound speech yesterday on “the public interest and the common good.” It engaged a range of nuanced and complex issues having to do with public media — particularly journalism — and is worth reading and pondering. I have to admit I’m impressed, this speech seems more aware of a number of important aspects of media culture than some of the pieces coming out of my own communion.

"Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum. Actual human learning about most things that matter happens in overlapping sets of relations and conversations. In human life generally, information, significant and otherwise, is shared in such overlapping networks, and absorbed at different levels over time. The journalistic assumption, though, follows a market pattern, in which a product is refined and distributed to a public defined for these purposes as concerned only to acquire it. And where that product is 'information', the model is particularly problematic."

"So there is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what other sources can't, information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the same time, it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers and the information it purveys as a commodity - which is therefore selected, packaged, and, to that degree, inevitably slanted. This unavoidable 'marketising' of the process has the effect of creating yet another interest group, the professional producers of information, whose power as suppliers in the market restricts the freedom of others."

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This is only one element of his argument, but it is a crucial one with profound consequences for the ways in which reality is constructed. People of faith -- now, more than ever -- need to be actively engaging the construction of reality going on all around us, and bringing our own specific perspectives to bear within it.