JOURNALISTS
“The Catholic Media Award reminds us that journalists with critical thinking skills who know how to make the news and are value-oriented are an important resource for both the community and the Church. The award-winning works bring honour to the profession. And the winners are a victory for all of us”. The president of the Association of Catholic Publicists Joachim Frank said this in Frankfurt yesterday evening at the award ceremony for the 16th Catholic Media Prize which this year was conferred on Johannes Böhme for “Difficult Children” (press category) and on Feras Fayyad and Gudrun Hanke-El Ghomri for “Last Men in Aleppo” (digital media category). Katja Grundmann and Anna Sprockhoff were awarded the Jury’s Special Award for their project “Growing up as a child refugee. A year later”. Journalism is even more essential today as we come across many unverified pieces of information from unknown sources on social media. For this reason, quality mass media are not only necessary but irreplaceable to hold our society together, especially in turbulent times”, said Bishop Gebhard Fürst (Rottenburg-Stuttgart), President of the Publicist Commission of the German Bishops’ Conference, who also called for transparency, that is, to “check events on the ground, by investigating and exploring also that which seems to be secondary or minor, to uncover what is hidden and make it public. This also applies, but not exclusively, to big scandals”, and most importantly to storytelling about “people who suffer greatly, or who can or are able to do something significant”.
