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More than its achievements, its failures have many times demonstrated how decisive a factor the press is in empowering the public.
The controlled press failed to provide Filipinos the information they needed for nearly two decades during the martial law period. The result was widespread ignorance of human rights violations, the costs of the war in southern Philippines, the rising power of the military, the uncontrolled corruption, the growing public debt, and the deteriorating state of the economy. Instead there developed a sense among many who came to adulthood during that period that it was a peaceful, prosperous time whose return today can only benefit everyone.
While the press was instrumental in Joseph Estrada’s removal from office in 2001, it had failed to keep him from Malacañang in the first place. By the grace of EDSA 1986 and the 1987 Constitution, free to provide the electorate the information that could guide it in choosing the country’s president in 1998, the press did not examine Estrada’s role in and involvement with the martial law regime, his business interests and ties with quasi-criminal groups and personalities, and his numerous mistresses and households.
By the time Filipinos learned about these aspects of his public and private lives, he had had two years in which to drive the country to ruin, and, were it not for EDSA 2, would have had four more to finish the task.
As the PJR Reports lead article, “Despite another year of scandals: A Lean Harvest of Investigative Reports” (p. 10) found, the inadequacies of reactive and limited press coverage of vital issues was very much in evidence in 2007.
By near-universal agreement, the Arroyo watch is distinguished by extreme corruption, gross inefficiency and mismanagement, military ascendancy, and human rights violations—all reminiscent of the Marcos period.
A government policy of opacity and concealment rather than transparency and openness is among the factors that have led to events reporting rather than investigation and analysis.
Despite constitutional recognition of the public’s right to information, it has become more and more difficult for both the press and the public to obtain information from official sources. Many are not only under such gag orders as Executive Order 464. They are also so immersed in various forms of wrong-doing self-preservation dictates that they conceal information from the media and the public.
There is the fear factor as well. While the killing of journalists has not had the same chilling effect on the national press it has had on the community press, the libel suits, threats of inciting to sedition cases, open references to media vulnerability through franchises that could be withdrawn, as well as arrests such as those of November 29 could only have discouraged the investigative reporting the country needs in the face of the corruption scandals that have come one after another since 2001, and whose numbers have multiplied since 2004.
Whatever the reasons, there is no denying the impact of press inadequacy before the challenge to ask the right questions and to search out the information that can help the public make sense of such horrors as the US$329.4-million NBN-ZTE conspiracy and the apparent bribery of governors and congressmen in Malacanang itself last November.
The first is on the public. Many citizens are as bewildered in the aftermath as they had been at the outset, and throw up their hands in resignation over ever being able to get at the truth of these and other issues. The second is on officialdom itself, which has become even more emboldened and brazen in wrongdoing in the certainty that no bad deed will ever be punished.
A new year is the time to look back as well as ahead. The Philippine press needs to improve its performance now more than ever, for its own sake as well as that of the public it serves. That public is becoming more and more aware that something is missing, and that that missing element is sustained press focus on the corruption issues that have metastasized throughout the body politic. This awareness is driven by the sense that the press seems to be, if not asleep at the watch in this long night of crisis, only half awake—in the process allowing what is arguably the most irresponsible political class in Southeast Asia to get away with some of the grossest offenses to democratic and honest government it has been the country’s misfortune to suffer.
Luis V. Teodoro
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