John Paul II, Media Critic

This was a pope who wrote frequently about the media -- and often with the kind of detailed arguments you'd expect more from Ben Bagdikian than the former archbishop of Krakow. John Paul II was surely the only successor to Peter who left an encyclical that could be read as an endorsement of the Federal Communications Commission's ban on media cross-ownership.
"The solution to problems arising from unregulated commercialization and privatization does not lie in state control of media, but in more regulation according to criteria of public service and in greater accountability," he wrote in Aetatis Novae.
In the very next sentence, though, John Paul warned "government intervention [in the media] remains an instrument of oppression and exclusion."
This tension between individual liberty and media responsibility was a theme the pope explored constantly. He proclaimed individual freedom of expression to be not only a natural right of man, but said, in the encyclical Communio et Progressio, that in speaking out freely, people "are also performing a social duty."
On World Communications Day in 1999, John Paul lauded journalists as "witness to the truth about life, about human dignity, about the true meaning of our freedom and mutual interdependence."