Ex. 1.Identifying aspects of communication.Read the text and get ready to dwell on the main elements of the communicative episode under consideration.

Faith and the Media

Speech given at Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor Lecture 2008 series

By M. Thompson, Director-General

April 10, 2008

[Again he began to teach them by the lakeside, but such a huge crowd gathered round him that he got into a boat on the water and sat there. The whole crowd were at the lakeside on land.

He taught them many things in parables, and in the course of his teaching he said to them, “listen! Imagine a sower going out to sow. Now it happened that, as he sowed, some of the seed fell on the edge of the path and the birds came and ate it up.

“Some seed fell on rocky ground where it found little soil and at once sprang up, because there was no depth of earth, and when the sun came up it was scorched and, not having any roots, it withered away.

“Some seed fell into thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it produced no crop. And some seeds fell into rich soil, grew tall and strong, and produced a good crop; the yield was thirty, sixty, even a hundredfold.” And he said, “anyone who has ears for listening should listen!”

Mark 4, 1-9]

Hundreds of years before it was used to describe radio transmissions and long, long before it became the middle “B” in the initials BBC, the word broadcast began life as a term of art in horticulture. As many people here tonight will know, it’s a kind of sowing in which the sower scatters seeds widely over a given patch of ground rather than sowing it in strips.

You can guess some of the advantages and disadvantages. You get the job done quickly but you never quite know where your seed will go or what will happen to it.

The English word is only a few centuries old, but broadcast sowing itself is ancient, maybe the most ancient form of sowing there is. And it’s clearly what the sower is doing in the parable we just heard about the sower and the seed. He’s broadcasting.

For me, this parable is a perfect place to begin a consideration of the relationship between faith and the mass media.

So many of the conversations about religion and the media begin with the words: “if only”. If only there were more programmes like this Easter’s drama The Passion. If only there were less. If only the newspapers took religion more seriously. If only the BBC would refrain from broadcasting pieces like Jerry Springer – The Opera. If only humanists and atheists were allowed onto Thought For The Day. If only.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the mass media in general, and broadcasting in particular, has a direct one-for-one power to change minds and alter opinions.

How much wiser the model of communication presented in the parable. Not only do you never know who is going to see, or hear, or read what. More importantly, you can never predict what they’re going to make of it. The same words, the same programmes provoke diametrically opposing reactions in different people. They can mean, they can signify utterly different things.

And in no subject, no genre, is this more true than it is about religion.

<…> I have what some will regard as a rather counter-intuitive story to tell. It is how, over a generation – as it happens over roughly the time I’ve been involved in broadcasting myself – one picture of religion has been replaced by another, more complex, more challenging, in many ways deeper one. I’ll talk about some of the new, seemingly intractable dilemmas that this change has confronted us with. I’ll also try to explain why, when I look to the future of the relationship between faith and the media, what I feel, most of time at least, is hope.

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