THE president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) urged the people “to refrain from patronizing, popularizing and supporting identified sources of “alternative facts” or “fake news”.

In a pastoral exhortation dated June 21 titled “Consecrate them in the truth”, Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, also called on the sources of news  “to rebut and refute falsehood whenever they are in possession of facts and of data.”

Villegas exhorted them “to refuse to be themselves purveyors of fake news and to desist from disseminating this whether on social media or by word of mouth or through any other form of public expression” even as he encouraged them “to identify the sources of fake news so that our brothers and sisters may be duly alerted and may know which media and which sites to shun”.

“Human life would be impossible in a society where we constantly and habitually deceived each other,” he said.

He said crucial decisions — personal and social — depend on the accurate grasp of facts.

Alternative facts and fake news, he said, engender faulty decisions many times with disastrous long-term consequences to persons and to communities.

“Sadly, we see this happening today. There are persons who have given themselves to the service of reporting what never happened, concealing what really happened, and distorting what should be presented in a straightforward manner,” Villegas said.

He stressed that the active involvement of citizens in creating a nurturing society steeped in justice depends on the truth. “That is the service to which media is called,” he said.

He pointed out, “But social media which, initially, promised to democratize expression and free the dissemination of truth from the clutches of moneyed entrepreneurs financing mainstream media has become the unfortunate site of alternative facts and fake news. (Tita Roces)

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