In my column last month, I commented on some questions that seemed significant to me from the interview with Pope Francis that was published in the Argentine media on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his pontificate. It was a novelty because until then Francisco had not given any interview to the media in his country (he did it both before and after, but very rarely).

On Thursday, May 25, just before the flu caused him to stop all his activities, Francisco gave another interview, this time to the channel Telemundo news. It’s the last one – at least to date – and this time the reporter was Julio Vaqueiro (you just need to put some of this data into your web browser to see it in full via streaming). Finally, before parting, Vaqueiro asked him for career advice. The Pope told him something that I want to emphasize because it is one of the most complete descriptions of journalism: be poets. Poets means creative. A journalist cannot be a machine, a carbon paper that mathematically tells what happened. A journalist must be creative, creative respecting the truth, reality.

Telling the truth is an essential obligation of journalism. All other characteristics of the profession can be debatable, and they can also mutate or have different proportions. Truth, on the other hand, has no weight and is not negotiable. But what is remarkable about Bergoglio’s sayings is that journalists must be poets. A great thing, because someone will think that poets do not respect the truth, but it is not so. Poets – and all artists – search for the truth, it happens that they search for it in their own way and everyone expresses it in their own style, which is usually much more accessible to the audience. The truth of artists is neither more nor less true than the truth of scientists, religions or judges. That’s just another way of saying it, but also, in the special case of journalism, its mission is to satisfy the truth urgency of every human being.

The reality, the story, what happened… cannot be changed. But you can change the narrative of history…

The Pope adds that respect for reality, which is all data. The reality, the story, what happened… cannot be changed. But you can change the narrative of history (which we unfortunately also call history) and there are many ways to tell it without missing the truth, however many people tell it. When Francisco asks us journalists to be poets, he asks us to respect reality and at the same time make it attractive, interesting, attractive. Those of us who have devoted ourselves to this profession know this, but it is great that the Pope tells everyone this, and in clear words.

Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers have argued that in order to tell the truth, we must first know it; that’s why they define it as the adequacy of thinking about reality. A fool is he who ignores it, but still counts; and who knows her but lies is a cynic.

Ryszard Kapuścinski has already said that cynics are useless for this job. But neither are they fools: neither fools nor cynics can be journalists. (OR)