Media charged to defend morality - As Gleaner celebrates 185th with church service, bishop urges journalists to help pull Ja back from dark path

As The Gleaner continued its 185th anniversary celebrations with a church service yesterday, local journalists have been urged to display courage in highlighting stories that defend morality, a characteristic Suffragan Bishop of Kingston The Reverend Dr Robert Thompson said was important for Jamaicans to flourish.

Thompson was delivering the sermon at the St George’s Anglican Church in Kingston during the special service ahead of The Gleaner Company (Media) Ltd’s September 13 birthday.

The service was attended by employees at all levels of the company as well as stakeholders from various sectors of society. Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Science, Energy and Technology Minister Fayval Williams were also present.

Thompson said morals were lacking in Jamaica, and globally, because individuals want to set their own rules, which he said “explains largely why we are at the place we are at in Jamaica”.

DEFEND MORAL FIBRE

“Today, The Gleaner Company joins us in celebrating 185 years of journalistic stewardship, always striving to protect the highest values of our society. Individuals are not born with any built-in system that tells us when our actions are evil. We only know that in relation to the values outside of ourselves.

“Nourishing those values for ourselves and for the common good is becoming more and more challenging and requires from … our journalists the courage to narrate stories that not only place the spotlight on what entertains and relieves the boredom of mundane living, but will contribute to the defence of the moral fibre that ultimately sustains our human flourishing,” the bishop declared.

Thompson lamented what he described as Jamaicans losing the ability to reflect on their own self-destructive ways and to grieve past wrongs. He referenced a book authored by former Archbishop of Cantabury Rowan Williams titled The Lost Icons, which reflects on what the archbishop called cultural bereavement over the loss of values and morals “which provided the glue that held communities together and provided foundation for moral choices”.

Linking the literature to the Jamaican culture, Thompson indicated agreement with the words of the archbishop, that we have lost much of the “imaginative patterns for thinking about ourselves”.

“We have willingly dropped from our vocabulary words like remorse and forgiveness simply because it is too painful to reflect on the wrong we do and too much of a challenge to seek reparation. A culture that has lost its ability to reflect on its own self-destructive ways and to grieve over past wrongs has no future, and the scary thing is that Jamaica is on the verge of that point. We can choose darkness and death, but we don’t have to.”