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It’s a cliché in these parts, the idea that crisis brings out the best in people, but crisis can also, and does bring out, the worst in men and women. For every taxi driver who returns a laptop a passenger has left in his cab, for example, there must be hundreds of other people who would not only grab any opportunity to make a few dishonest pesos, but who would even go out of their way to take something that doesn’t belong to them, often with the use of force or subterfuge.
One can say the same of the Philippine media, which incidentally habitually play up every incident of people being at their best and most honest because it’s so rare. The political crisis that has haunted the Arroyo administration as well as the country as a whole has brought out the best in some of the media. But it has also brought out the worst.
In 2007 among the results of that crisis, primarily because of the Arroyo regime’s efforts at media suppression, was a decline in the number of investigative reports, ironically in the context of a spate of government scandals and a regime policy of concealment.
It was unfortunate but understandable. The media were unprepared for the shift from the policy of transparency that had been in place since the Aquino government to the policy of opaqueness of the Arroyo regime primarily because it was not only unannounced; it was also a creeping, gradual process that surprised the unwary.
The shift was in fact achieved through an accumulation of various acts and policies that before anyone knew it had made getting information and reporting it difficult as well as suspect. The truth-telling at the heart of the journalistic enterprise had become twice more dangerous for journalists, who found themselves at risk of arrest and of being charged with libel and inciting to sedition, even as the killing of journalists in the communities continued, encouraged by government indifference and the inherent weaknesses of the justice system.
If the boost in the number and depth of reports on the current crisis is any gauge (see “Political Controversies: First Quarter Shows Coverage Boost”, pp. 12-16) , at least part of the media is well on the way to recovery, and what’s more, many journalists are quickly learning how to extract information, in behalf of the public that needs and wants it, from an officialdom dedicated to concealing it. Official evasion, disinformation and even the arrest of journalists appear to have taught the media the signal lesson that their adversarial relationship with government, particularly with this government, demands the firmest allegiance to getting at the truth that it seeks to conceal.
On the other hand, the problems low professional standards in the context of a regime of self-regulation have remained, despite the existence of such mechanisms as the press ombudsman system and press councils (see “Tirol resigns as PDI Ombudsman,” p. 22 and “The right of reply: voluntary compliance or legal sanction?,” pp. 18-19). In many cases those who believe themselves to have been abused by the media have had no recourse except the courts, among other reasons because the decision makers in too many media organizations pay lip service to self-regulation but are at heart hostile to it.
And yet self-regulation as well as continuing professionalization are the only alternatives to a regime of external regulation and media failure to deliver the information, analyses, and context that the times demand. Such a failure will further encourage government efforts at intervention, and deprive the people the information they need to understand and to transform the structures of political power that have been so crucial in the making of Philippine society as we know it.
Luis V. Teodoro
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