As part of activities marking this year’s World Communications Day, Pope Francis has call for a review strategy on disseminating information on the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Speaking at the symbolic event held in an empty hall, at the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria (CSN) Durumi Abuja, on Sunday, the Secretary General of CSN, Rev. Fr. Zacharia Samjumi, who presented the Pope’s message, noted that humanity have come to love stories and that while there are good stories, there are also bad stories.
According to him, in the present-day time, bad stories are overwhelmingly more than the good ones.
“We have come to like packaging and packaging goes with which is not true, falsification of the information in other to make it palatable, to make it beautiful.
“The fight against COVID-19 has come to us from many angles such that many people did still not believe it as they only hear of the figures and not the patients.
“But the virus is real and is with us.
“People are not getting the information correctly, COVID-19 is here, real and is killing.
“It more worrisome that you can have it and you may not know and you may infect other people who may not have a strong immune system like you.
“So, we truly need to tell this story, we can tell people that COVID-19 kills and they would say hunger kills them too, so they care less than expected.
“The disruption cannot go on forever.
“So, all have a duty to tell the COVID-19 story in such a way to bring reality and not to spread fear and truly it would change the situation. So, we need to tell the story clearly so that we all appreciate the enormity of the virus in the country,” Samjumi said.
The Pope in his global homily said he was calling people’s attention to the need to revive the age long-form of communication storytelling, as stories are very important to human life, because ‘human beings are storytellers’ by nature and that stories foster growth and self-discovery in the human persons, thereby enriching them for the struggles of daily living.
“Stories influence our lives, whether in the form of fairy tales, novels, films, songs, news, even if we do not always realize it. And they leave their mark on us; they shape our convictions and our behaviour.
“We are in an age when falsification is increasingly sophisticated, an age where people peddle unverified information, repeating banal and deceptively persuasive arguments, sending strident and hateful messages. Indeed, we are in an age where people create and manipulate stories so as to corrupt human minds as well as for exploitation,” Pope Francis said.
He, therefore, insisted that this ugly situation calls for a conscious and robust response from Church leaders, pastoral agents, media practitioners, and from all men and women of goodwill.
He said, “On our media platforms, we need to focus our gaze beyond the VIPs and star-buster characters in our community and the larger society, so that we can also capture the many silent heroes in our parishes and communities for prominent reportage. This is particularly so because stories do not have to always be sweet or rosy, rather they should be truthful and aimed at giving hope.”
