How a Pope is turned into a media figure

Vatican City - The manipulation of communication today rarely passes through the crude falsification of facts. It happens, certainly, but less often. The mechanism is more subtle: some journalists take a real detail, magnify it, turn it into the dominant interpretative key and push everything else into the background. In this way they try to steer the reader before he has even engaged with a speech, a gesture or a journey. Studies on framing describe this process exactly: the media make certain aspects of reality more visible than others and thus influence public judgement.

Since the election of Leo XIV, this pattern has re-emerged with particular clarity, according to a dynamic already familiar in the days of Benedict XVI. Part of the media system, including the Dicastery for Communication itself, has decided to box the Pope into a pre-packaged representation, to be interpreted according to ideological categories that precede his texts and his actions. The logic, in the end, is brutal in its simplicity: if you are not liked, a narrative is built around you that makes you appear in the eyes of the public as what others want you to be, not for what you actually say and do. On this way of operating, Silere non possum will publish an investigation in the coming days containing exclusive revelations.