Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 4/21/25

Headline:  “The Pope and the Press”

“In late February, with Pope Francis critically ill in the hospital, CJR’s Sacha Biazzo spoke with members of the Vaticanisti, the Italian term for the press corps that covers the pope.. .”

“From his early days as pope, however, he appeared to be savvy about countering negative narratives while, intentionally or not, cultivating an image as a common man (by doing things precisely like canceling his own newspaper subscription); he didn’t put the papacy on Twitter—that was Benedict, at the very end of his tenure—but as the years rolled by, he harnessed it as he ‘revolutionized the Vatican’s media strategy with his direct and personal approach to communication,’ as my colleague Biazzo put it, “making him one of the most accessible popes in history. . . .”

“In 2018, he made a major intervention on “fake news,” which he likened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; his analysis, the Times wrote at the time, was partially “questionable,” not least in its apparent conflation of disinformation with “an incremental and sensational style of journalism he dislikes,” but otherwise “offered a largely cleareyed assessment of the problem, its social impact, and the responsibility of social media giants and journalists. . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/pope_death_journalists_media.php