Media meltdown and the Tao of the Pope

In a sea of chaos and muzzled or fake news, the powerless Power of the Church could be the new anchor for unbiased information.

Once, the USSR feared Western free media. Press objectivity was a virus that infected the Soviet bubble of falsehood with truth. In self-defense, Moscow accused the press of lying.

Now, in the West, many accuse the free media of spreading lies, joining the ranks of those in authoritarian countries who have sown the seeds of doubt and mistrust in the independent media for decades. Hasn’t the West lost an important tool?

It’s not just about international politics. Undermining a free press undermines free markets, the source of wealth and development over the past three to four centuries, and the cornerstone of liberal societies. Free markets need a free flow of information that levels the playing field.

If information isn’t free, the flow is biased, favoring some economic groups over others. The whole environmental balance of liberal societies gets out of whack and can start spinning out of control.

If free markets are no longer trustworthy, capital seeks other harbors, endangering the Western system, which is grounded in free markets.

The trend doesn’t come from this head of state’s dislike of this or that piece of news or this or that outlet. It may be more structural than some mercurial outbursts.

Long-term trend

In the past two decades, social media flooded the infosphere with an unprecedented volume of low-quality news, crowding out highbrow information, just as bad money drives out good.

It’s not all bad. The flood of unverified, unprofessional news, along with the dearth of resources for old-school journalists, has toppled the ebony tower of old-fashioned, stiff information and let in some fresh air. (Our modest effort with Appia would have been impossible with the old media system.) 

But with that, billions of poisonous bugs (some tiny, others huge) also got in, changing the information environment forever without any of the new big media companies taking much responsibility or sharing income.

Once, newspapers paid about 70% of their income to print and distribution; now they owe it to the cloud of internet services. The services got rich, the newspapers grew poor, and a vicious cycle of quality collapse ensued.

Journalists were well-paid, highly skilled professionals. Now, social media has destroyed the rigidity of information and its professionalism. As data managers know, without high-quality data, every result is corrupted.

When I was young, I was fascinated by big ideas in philosophy. Still, my professor of classical philology, Paul Thompson, insisted that I first determine what the word actually was in the text (corrupted through centuries of heedless copying and recopying) and what it meant at the time it was written.

Flooded with fake news, unverified gossip, wild guesses, imagination, fantasies, conspiracy theories, and misleading fabrications, we are undermining reliable information and, consequently, the free press.

Only a few outlets seem trustworthy and reliable; the rest is often confusing noise. Countries that allow deafening uproar or shut everything down, allowing only official voices to come through, are also unreliable, though in different ways. But the two forms of unreliability may mirror each other, and authoritarian systems with their muzzled press may find new justification in the flood of western disinformation, openly distrusted by the same western leaders.

It becomes a labyrinth where everyone is lost, and lies from one side are equal to lies from the other.

Truth in the Vatican

As an international actor, the Vatican could be the most trusted to tell the truth. This is a new reality for the Church, which places immense new responsibilities on the Holy See.

Beyond belief or non-belief in God, the Church — in its lack of power — is pure soft Power that can control the finger on the trigger of the rifle from which “ordinary” power may come.

In this, the Church’s Power is beyond the control of other particular powers. But for this very reason, it attracts some (the USA) or frightens others (Russia and China). Attraction may be better than frightening, but it doesn’t solve everything. To be Power, the Church must “do the right thing” in a reasonable way.

The Church seeks good relations with every country, provided that country doesn’t harm others. The good of the world is the good of the Church. In this, the Church is careful to preserve order and promote a just order.

The USA, the cornerstone of the present order, used to believe that the good of the world was the good of America and vice versa. That position aligned the Church and the USA almost naturally.

Thus, Pope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) is the America the world loves to love. America can chase after the Pope, but cannot expect the Pope to chase after America — he would cease to be Pope and to have Power.

It’s the Tao of the Pope, and the Tao, as the Chinese know, feeds on the contradictions of yin and yang and is the basis for everything. Without Tao, there is nothing. And now the best available Tao is that of the Pope, head of the world’s largest unitary religion, speaking to 8 billion people on Earth.

Here lies the fragile balance between the USA and the Holy See. That the USA does not flee from the Vatican and is not hostile is a positive fact, better than those who keep the Vatican at the door. Certainly, finding a balance between “powers” and the Power of the Pope is not easy, given the conundrums of the Tao of papal Power.