The Pope has warned against the exploitation and manipulation of people and communities by the media.
In a message for World Communications Day, Pope John Paul II said communication through the media is not simply an exercise in motivation, persuasion or selling. "Still less is it a vehicle for ideology."
"The media can at times reduce human beings to units of consumption or competing interest groups, or manipulate viewers and readers and listeners as mere ciphers from whom some advantage is sought, whether product sales or political support; and these things destroy community."
It is the task of communication to bring people together and enrich their lives, not to isolate and exploit them, he said.
The means of social communication, properly used, can help to create and sustain a human community based on justice and charity, he said, and, insofar as they do that, they will be signs of hope.
The challenge for the church, he said, is to integrate the Gospel message into the "new culture" created by modern communications.
They create this new culture with their "new languages, new techniques and new psychology".
Integrating the Gospel message with this new culture is more than a matter of using the media to spread the Gospel, he warned.
The means of social communication available now represent "a great forum which, at its best, makes possible the exchange of truthful information, constructive ideas and sound values, and so creates community". Christian communicators needed to learn to work effectively in a media environment of this kind, he said.
The Pope said that among the signs of hope in today's world were scientific, technological and especially medical progress in the service of human life; a greater awareness of our responsibility for the environment; efforts to restore peace and justice where they had been violated and a desire for reconciliation and solidarity among peoples, particularly in the complex relationship between the North and South of the world.