On Reporting Savagery

I gave a digital communications workshop over the weekend, and in updating my resource links for the participants (my online chart of links was swallowed up by the cloud sometime over the spring, I just realized), I came across some timely advice from a really important (in my opinion, unsurpassed) Church document on communications, Communio et Progressio.

Since the barbarians in Iraq and Syria are using social media so effectively, it would be very helpful for our media, and for all of us readers and writers and re-tweeters of social media to keep this in mind:

43. The reporting of violence and brutality demands a special care and tact. There is no denying that human life is debased by violence and savagery and that such things happen in our own time and perhaps more now than ever before. It is possible to delineate all this violence and savagery so that men will recoil from it. But if these bloody events are too realistically described or too frequently dwelt upon, there is a danger of perverting the image of human life. It is also possible that such descriptions generate an attitude of mind and, according to many experts, a psychosis which escapes the control of the very forces that unleashed it. All this may leave violence and savagery as the accepted way of resolving conflict.