Pope Francis has lambasted media organisations that focus on scandals and smears and promote fake news as a means of discrediting people in public life. Spreading disinformation was “probably the greatest damage that the media can do”, the pontiff told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio. It is a sin to defame people, he added.
Using striking terminology, Francis said journalists and the media must avoid falling into “coprophilia” – an abnormal interest in excrement. Those reading or watching such stories risked behaving like coprophagics, people who eat faeces, he added.
The pope excused himself for using terminology that some might find repellent. “I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into – no offence intended – the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” he said. “And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”
He also spoke of the danger of using the media to slander political rivals. “The means of communication have their own temptations, they can be tempted by slander, and therefore used to slander people, to smear them, this above all in the world of politics,” he said.
“They can be used as means of defamation. No one has a right to do this. It is a sin and it is hurtful.”
Disinformation was the greatest potential harm the media could cause, he said, because “it directs opinion in only one direction and omits the other part of the truth”.
Wednesday’s interview was not the first time Francis has made the same point in unusual language. A year before being elected pope, he told the Italian newspaper La Stampa: “Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia, which is a sin that taints all men and women – that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.”
The pope’s latest comments on disinformation were made against a backdrop of a global debate over the proliferation of fake news websites and stories that present events through a highly partisan lens.
In the US, some observers have suggested that fake news could have swayed the presidential election in favour of Donald Trump. On 19 November the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced new steps to counter fake news on the platform, marking a departure from his scepticism that online misinformation was, as Barack Obama has put it, a threat to democratic institutions.
The “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which led to a self-radicalised gunman discharging his weapon in a popular pizza restaurant in Washington DC on Sunday, was spread with the help of fake news stories falsely accusing the owners of being part of a nonexistent paedophile ring with supposed ties to Hillary Clinton.