Archbishop's Speech at the One World Media Awards

Archbishop speaks

Bobby Kennedy, the younger brother of John F. Kennedy, and one time Democratic Presidential Candidate, until his assassination, used to keep in his desk drawer an extract of a copy of a letter sent by the poet John Keats to his brother and sister-in-law, George & Georgiana Keats in 1819.

The letter said this:

"While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events.

While we are laughing it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck."

I thought about the poignancy of this quote only recently whilst watching Peter Taylor's remarkable documentary series "The Age of Terror".

During the programme that deal with the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998 Peter Taylor noted that the attack received little coverage in America at the time and almost no-one paid attention to the name of the suspected mastermind of the plot.

Why? Because they were fixated upon the relationship between their President and Monica Lewinsky. The man behind the bombing was Osama Bin Laden.

Just as Keats had written, while the world laughed at presidential infidelity, a poison fruit was growing.

As Taylor said on his programme: "Whilst the world's media was concentrating on Washington and an affair that might not make it into the footnotes of history, in Nairobi history was being written in the ruins of a building and the bodies that were being dug out of it."

The challenge to tell the story of the trouble that grows in "the wide arable land of events" and then to "pick the poison fruit" is one that many of you are all too familiar with.

Through your work as journalists, you tell the world important stories which have to battle against gossip, trivia and celebrity for attention and through your work as aid agencies and workers, who seek not only to pick the poison fruit but to replant the tree and grow a new fruit of hope for men and women who are in need of your help.

Many of you will be familiar with the excellent recent book by Neil Davies – Flat Earth News – which shows not only how hard it is to raise the flag of human experience and triumph over the hubris of the latest series of Big Brother, but also the cynical distortion of values that operate in parts of our global media.

These values are at their most pernicious when the voices and views of people in the two-thirds world are drowned out by corporate and consumerist interests.

Sadly this is a state of affairs which is becoming more common.

Davies ends his book with a quote from a study by John Nichols and Robert McChesney which says this:

"This is a generation that is under pressure from the media it consumes to be brazenly materialistic, selfish, depoliticised and non-socially minded .... They live in a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, where the wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge."

As we gather here to celebrate the work of so many that flies in the face of such values, I would like to thank you all for the invaluable work you do in fighting back against the greed and self-centredness which pervades the media industry.

In Matthew's Gospel Jesus Christ tells his disciples they are salt and light through their actions: they offer a sign of change and hope to the world around them. And he instructs them, "Make your light shine, so that others will see the good that you do and will praise your Father in Heaven." (Matt 5:16)

I give thanks to my Father in heaven for your work as NGOs, as Aid Agencies and as Journalists. It represents a light that shines, like a city on a hill and that offers an alternative path to those who would be seduced by celebrity, trivialised by gossip and depoliticised by cynicism.

Mahatma Ghandi challenged people to be the change they wanted to see in the world. And that is precisely what many of you do. It is a pleasure and privilege for me to be able to give out these awards this evening.

May God bless you all in your continuing efforts to bring your light to bear on the world around you and to give a voice to the voiceless in our world. Continue to be like salt and light to everyone on earth.

Thank you.