Cardinal Karl Lehmann, president of the German Episcopal Conference, handed over the Catholic award for the media in recent days. The annual award, now in its first year, went to Regina Buckreus and Gert Krautbauer for their reportage “Gregoire’s List” on the life of the mentally disabled in Africa and to Karla Krause for a radio programme on those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Some 200 representatives of the Church, politics and the media attended the award ceremony. In his speech, Cardinal Lehmann deplored the “media market dominated by economic principles, in which the ‘how’ is often more important than the ‘what'”. According to Lehmann, the war in Iraq demonstrates “how difficult it can be to conduct responsible journalism in a situation of strong media competition”; in the recent conflict, there was “a deterioration of the situation compared with the first Gulf War, though it too was a ‘media war'”. Lehmann also criticised the style and format of such television programmes as “Big Brother” and “Superstar”, which “are part of a powerful commercial mechanism; one would have to ask oneself how far the people involved in such programmes are degraded to objects”. To counter this situation, Lehmann declared that it is the “great task” of journalists “to work also in a subversive way and to illuminate what is left in the darkness… We have a need, now more than ever, for journalists who resist the ‘pressure of audience share'”.
