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member, Human Development and Harmony Cluster, Pamayanang SanibLakas ng Pilipinas
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1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism 2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine 3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission 5. Civics and Democratic Governance 6. Culture as Community Creativity 7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education 8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony 9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice 10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development 11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations 12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology 13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships 14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace 15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart' . |
The Philippine Press: An Arena of Compromises* By Luis Teodoro Teodoro is a former dean and still a journalism professor of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. He is also the editor of the Philippine Journalism Review The following is his presentation during the “State of the Media” forum organized by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility at the Filipinas Heritage Library on August 23, 2000. SINCE THIS IS a forum on media, I'm going to start with the good news. The good news is that important changes for the better have taken place in Philippine journalism since 1986. From that period onwards there has been a growth in reporting the environment, women's issues, science and technology, civil society and all those other areas that before 1986 were either previously ignored or only minimally covered. I refer not only to the martial law period but even before 1972, when there was at best minimal reporting on the environment, virtually nothing on human rights, and no mention at all of women and gender issues. I might also mention that before 1972 there was far less restraint in the reporting of such crimes as rape, as a quick scan of the pre-September 1972 issues of the major newspapers will reveal. The attention on underreported or unreported subjects was a consequence of the awareness during the great flowering of ideas that followed 1986 that, though crucial to our understanding of this country, had been neglected. This neglect had led to our getting a distorted sense of what was going on. The attention the media began to pay, and continues to pay to these areas, is therefore one of the bright spots in the history of Philippine media in the last decade and a half. Among others, it has institutionalized a mindset concerned with what is current and relevant. It has led to some exceptional reporting on, among others, information technology, an area critical to our lives in the 21st century. Part of the good news as well is that Philippine media during this period also realized the need to examine themselves as institutions vital to the future of this country, and which are important as news subjects in an environment in which media have become more pervasive and more influential than ever before. The founding of media advocacy groups, among them the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, was the material manifestation of the realization within the profession of the need for self-evaluation and self-regulation in a democratizing society. Investigative Journalism However, it is the growth of investigative journalism in an environment still burdened by the legacies of secrecy of the martial law period which was the most significant gain of Philippine journalism after 1986. The establishment of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism was the turning point in this rediscovery of a form that, while already in existence before 1972, was largely limited to exposés, sensationalized and muck-raking articles. It is a rediscovery in print as well as broadcast, in both of which, prior to and after 1972, there had not been the same attention to rigorous research as is occurring now. These gains, however, were won and can be sustained only in conditions which, while not necessarily ideal, are at least not hostile and antagonistic to the journalistic enterprise. This morning we could chart our destination toward determining whether those conditions do obtain under the present circumstances as these are defined by the policies and actions of the Estrada administration, and what we can do to either attain those conditions or to assure their continuity. Interesting Difference To start with, let me call your attention to an interesting difference in President Estrada's appreciation of the press today compared to a year ago. In 1999 President Estrada filed a P101-million libel suit against one newspaper and convinced his friends in the film industry to withdraw their ads from another. Although the first newspaper apologized to him and was soon sold to an associate, while the second lost millions from ads that never came, he kept grumbling throughout the year, and would take frequent potshots at the press -- specially the second one, which as we all know was the Philippine Daily Inquirer -- as the mood moved him. Presidential displeasure was so intense and so much in evidence in 1999 that there was among some journalists real fear for their physical safety; at one point the Inquirer hired bodyguards for at least one reporter and its publisher. This year President Estrada seems to have stopped grumbling altogether, at least about the press. He hasn't said anything about the supposed bias and unfairness of the press since January. It's perfectly understandable because he and his government have been getting a pretty good press lately. It's not all because of the new owners of the Manila Times -- where in one remarkable period last summer, he was the subject of the banner stories for nine days consecutive days. A CMFR study on the coverage of the Mindanao crisis indeed revealed not a press bias against government but a bias for it -- evident, for example, in the fact that of more than 1,400 articles out of 1,633 on the Mindanao crisis which cited sources, 1,055 named the government and its various spokespersons and agencies. For exhibit two we have the publication of the PCIJ article on those 66 corporations only in five newspapers of smaller circulations than the big three -- the Inquirer, the Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Star -- as one more indication this year that Mr. Estrada may not really have much to grumble about. Remember the honeymoon with the press that he didn't have in 1998? Gone today are the recriminations, the mutual suspicion, and the alleged fault-finding of certain newspapers in mid-1998. Instead, it's almost all sweetness and light -- a consequence, one suspects, of both Mr. Estrada's Mindanao policy, and the result as well of fear: fear of economic losses, fear of being audited for tax liabilities, and plain fear of what this presidency might be capable of. It's happening now -- this is the honeymoon though it came two years late. The message of that honeymoon is that the powerful need not fear media. If they wait long enough, even their former spokespersons can be columnists in the very newspapers they were criticizing only a year ago. Political Economy If we're looking for reasons for these and other strange events in this archipelago of perennial surprises, surely the political economy of Philippine mass media must rank as the most basic. Philippine mass media are privately owned and, in most instances, owned by political and economic interests. From this proceeds a fundamental conflict: that between the public interest that media is supposed to serve, and the private interests of those that control them. The Philippine media system is patterned after the American model, but with a difference. It is a system in which reader militancy is far far less developed, and it exists in a society too young for expectations of media to have taken root among a public that for the most part doesn't understand media, and as a consequence can hardly monitor its performance. Indeed even among too many media practitioners, there is the belief that despite the public's stake in media, the public has no business criticizing newspapers or television stations -- indicative of a failure to realize that media as public institutions are accountable to the public.
One of the consequences of private media ownership is that media are too often an arena of intellectual compromise because the interests that control them cannot challenge the very society that sustains those interests. Tradition of Compromise In addition to the plain politics and economics involved, the tradition of compromise is also historically part of the tradition that supplanted the reformist and revolutionary tradition during the American colonial period, when the antecedents of today's nerwspapers argued for independence but only after Filipinos shall have been educated in self-government; and upheld press freedom, but not to the point of its being used to argue for decolonization. In contradiction, we could cite the stellar role of the Philippine press during the late martial law period, but in doing so we would be citing a different press: that press we often label as alternative, and which is in the tradition established by the reform and revolutionary movements. Unfortunately, the alternative press is a press for periods of revolution, of invasion and great political upheavals, when the interests that rule mainstream media make it unable to resist tyranny whether domestic or foreign. During periods of relative stability, as this period is, despite our own sometimes extreme opinions of it, the alternative press recedes into the background and gives way to the, for lack of a better phrase, mainstream press, with all its attendant encumbrances, among them its ownership by various political and economic interests, its susceptibility to pressures from advertisers, and its being driven by the commercial imperative of making money or at the very least reducing losses. Difficult as it may sound, the only way these flaws can be addressed is through self-regulation and a critical public. Then secretary and now columnist Jerry Barican identified last year are not the monopoly of one newspaper, but shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by our broadsheets -- all of which, at one time or another, have been guilty of, among others, faulty attribution, sensationalism, unfairness, lack of balance, biased reporting, and plain garden variety inaccuracy. But unlike the Inquirer, which has been guilty of these offenses when reporting not only on government and the presidency but also when reporting on other institutions, groups and individuals, most of our other broadsheets have been guilty of these sins in behalf of, not against, government. The adversarial relationship we are often told governs the relationship between media and government is not so much adversarial as cordial as far as most of the other newspapers on the one hand and government on the other are concerned-- although some naughty columnists like Vergel Santos have lately suggested that cordial relations have also been established between Mr. Estrada and the newspaper he once loved to hate. Unanimity For Government In any event, as of last year it seemed that what President Estrada wanted was not just the approval of the majority but unanimity in favor of government. Unanimity is always dangerous, given the vital role information plays in developing citizen capacity for decision-making. It is equally dangerous for government, which, if it is serious in addressing the problems of the governed, needs to have a sense not only of what the governed are thinking and what they really want, but also alternatives to its own and its allies' views.
The government can't be listening only to what it wants to hear, that being the equivalent of talking to itself. If it is serious. This is the function that governments have always been sensitive about, or in extreme cases are even paranoid about, perhaps because it can bring to light what governments would prefer to leave in darkness -- affecting, we have often been told, even the stability of the political system. In support of that contention Filipinos cite the Filipino experience. Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo are said to have helped in the overthrow of Spanish power in the Philippines, Rizal's intentions at reform notwithstanding. La Solidaridad, a reformist newspaper, is also credited with helping make that process possible. In more recent times the press is alleged to have been pivotal in the 1986 overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos' dictatorship. Conserving Power Yet the other side of the capacity of the press to upset the status quo is its conserving power. Journalists can also do the opposite --their writing can enslave rather than liberate, prevent change rather than hasten it. Those journalists whose work belongs in this category have always been the more numerous and the more influential. If practicing in the Philippine press, they can find all sorts of reasons to explain away the "salvaging" -- that exquisitely ironic word of Filipino coinage! -- of criminal and NPA suspects, as well as the validity of mobile checkpoints, of body and car searches without probable cause, or, more recently, the total war policy in Mindanao. If they are in foreign news agencies, they report for the vast information systems that blanket the globe -- which, despite their size and reach, have a surprisingly homogenous outlook. It is not these latter journalists governments find most irksome, but those whose reporting can lead to demonstrations, uprisings and social change -- or even to changes, no matter how minute, in the popularity ratings of politicians. In recognition of that potential, governments usually regard journalists in general and critical, progressive and reform-minded journalists in particular as members of a community to be carefully monitored, and whose utterances need to be controlled. These journalists are right now not in plentiful supply in this part of the planet. One of the reasons for this is that in places like the Philippines, even those who merely want to do their jobs have to contend with whimsical libel suits, media owners frightened at the prospect of tax audits, pressures from the desk to produce the news stories that will sell more copies tomorrow morning, and the vicissitudes of the correspondent system, otherwise known as "column inch journalism," among others. The Committee to Protect Journalists' and other media monitoring groups' reports suggest that some journalists matter enough to be persecuted, jailed and even murdered. The presumption is that journalists, because they deal in information, can help populations make sense of what's happening, and no matter how indirectly, can be instrumental in mass decision-making.
This makes journalists potential lead actors in the democratization process and even in revolutions. While journalists, it has long been observed, do not overthrow governments, they can arm the consciousness of those who do - the citizens who storm prisons and palaces. If only that were true. Power and Freedom The press has no power if it has no freedom. It can't be part of the process of change if it can't get at the information, publish it, and disseminate it. Through censorship, libel or "insult", and national security laws, governments deny journalists the freedom to get the news, to write it, and to disseminate it. On a more mundane level, through low salaries or salaries delayed -- which can amount to salaries denied if they're not there when one needs to pay the rent -- media owners help deny journalists the professional conditions that permit them to perform their essential function. What this means is that in the end the power of the press can be exercised only if the real powers in society -- the state, its allied forces, and the owners of media -- allow it free rein. This is not simply a matter of law. No laws specific to the press regulate it in the Philippines. Journalists are subject only to the laws on libel, invasion of privacy, obscenity and others to which other citizens are subject. The Constitution in fact guarantees press freedom. Where other countries in Southeast Asia have "press laws," only during the martial law period were there ever special laws to cover the press, and even then the Marcos government relied primarily on national security laws to keep the press in line. Today the Philippine press' claim to freedom rests on the absence of such laws, among them those that in Singapore, for example, require the licensing of journalists. Since 1986, the laws Ferdinand Marcos decreed, among them the grossly unconstitutional National Security Act and the revised Anti-Subversion Law, have been repealed. The censorship systems that used to be administered by the police and military have long been dismantled, and the arrest of journalists for political offenses is now, so far, only a memory. It doesn't mean that it will always be so. It is tempting to conclude that in the absence of formal government regulation of print journalism (broadcasting is still regulated via the National Telecommunications Commission and film and video through the Movie and Television Ratings and Classification Board), the only enemy the press has today is itself. Some readers are actually beginning to complain that the Philippine press has become licentious and abusive, and arrogant and deaf to criticism, as well as habitually inaccurate and trivial. The suspicion also grows that corruption has taken a firmer hold than ever before, tainting with undetected bias the information readers receive, and making the press release the leading source of information for newspaper news. There are exceptions: journalists of unquestioned integrity who are capable, professional and dedicated to their work, owners who respect their staff members and the profession. All these, and in conditions in which government exercises no regulation over the press, too. But the absence of government controls doesn't necessarily lead to incisive comment and world-class reporting, this much we have learned, because both require training as well as commitment, peace of mind as well as mind enough, and an environment that encourages professional excellence. However, there are any number of people willing to invite government intervention in the press, and for that we must blame the irresponsibility, the sensation-mongering and trivialization that afflicts too much of Philippine media.
Indeed the Philippine press situation is uncannily similar to what the Australian journalist David Bowman, as quoted by John Pilger in a paper read at the 6th World Editors Forum in Zurich in June, 1999, claims in his book The Captive Press, is the state of affairs in the Australian press: "Most of these newspapers [in Australia], are without any underlying seriousness of purpose, except to make maximum profit, which means providing minimum public service... "Newspapers are getting dumber. The primary reason for these, says Mr. Bowman, is the character of media ownership in Australia, where it is rapidly turning into a monopoly, with the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has newspapers all over the world, in control of almost 70 percent of the metropolitan press. No such monopoly exists yet in the Philippines, although we may yet get there, but commercial interest has in any case become the primary driving force in the way the news is presented as well as in how news is defined. This is a dangerous situation because it provides an argument in favor of control, either through government regulation, economic intimidation, or what Malou Mangahas has referred to as "corporate strangulation." A Compliant Press All governments have a stake in information, especially the kind of information advantageous to it. In the absence of regulatory laws, or their weakness, governments have other means at their disposal to ensure a compliant press. In this respect the Estrada government very early discovered the biggest open secret in the Philippine press: its fundamental weakness' being its ownership by individuals and groups with business and, therefore, political interests to protect. If the threat to press freedom in the West, as Mr. Bowman says, emanates from the press itself, in the Philippines and in many other places it emanates as well from government. In most instances, however, government need not fear that the press will in the foreseeable future get to the core of the issues that confront Philippine society. It might eventually, through such efforts as the PCIJ's, but very slowly, and very painfully. The powerful need not fear such a press, and recent evidence suggests that they don't, which helps explain Mr. Estrada's current affection for it
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Distinction between democratic governance and 'participatory democracy'
