 The press failed to point out the dissonance between the President’s statements and the subsequent acts of her officials following the arrest of journalists and media technicians during the Nov. 29 Manila Peninsula siege.
Reports quoted President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo telling her Cabinet and top military and police officials last Dec. 1 to “not unnecessarily rile the media at this point in time.”
“I am a fervent believer in press freedom and the rule of law,” Arroyo was earlier quoted as saying in press reports. She also expressed regret that the “police procedures had become a problem to the media.”
The subsequent actions and statements by government and military and police officials on the issue, however, belied Arroyo’s policy announcements. The press almost uniformly agreed that the police moves were threats to press freedom. For example, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported last Dec. 4: “In a move a top ABS-CBN news executive said could be an attempt to scare the media, the Philippine National Police Monday ordered the network giant to submit its raw news footage of Thursday’s march by rebel soldiers on the Peninsula Manila hotel and the ensuing standoff.” (“ABS-CBN tapes sought: PNP order decried as attack on free press,” p. A1)
In a Dec. 5 dialogue between journalists and government officials on the issue, the press quoted Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno as saying that journalists were arrested last Nov. 29 for “consistent and persistent refusal to obey” police standard operating procedures and for “obstruction of justice.” Puno said that unless these procedures are amended, “journalists refusing to heed police ‘requests’ to vacate an area of conflict would continue to be arrested,” the Inquirer reported the next day.
The glaring discrepancy between Arroyo’s statements and the actions of her officials, ironically, bears on the way the government has been treating journalists.
The Manila Bulletin got its headline wrong on Dec. 6 (“Police, media approve guidelines: Puno, Razon assure newsmen on press freedom: Two-party dialogue irons out kinks in news coverages”).
The media and the police have not approved any guidelines on the media coverage of critical situations such as the Manila Peninsula siege. Both have yet to agree on what transpired last Nov. 29, and why members of the media were apprehended for doing their job.
The Bulletin failed to note the inconsistencies of the statements released by government officials. Its headline said that the government does not intend to curtail press freedom, but Interior and Local Government Secretary Ronaldo Puno also warned the media of possible arrest in similar situations in the future.
 The BusinessMirror published last Dec. 5 a com-prehensive analysis of the Manila Peninsula siege. In her story, Inday Espina Varona, Philippine Graphic editor, explained why most Filipinos did not support the siege (“In the Name of The People: Military adventurism’s genie still roams free,” C1 & C2).
Varona put the Nov. 29 event in the context of past coup attempts. She listed known personalities who had participated in attempted coups, like Sen. Gregorio Honasan and Army Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim. She also explained some of the terms being used to describe the event—“coup,” “political situation,” and “mutiny”—and ventured to speculate on what form of government Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV’s group might want to establish.
Varona analyzed the reaction of the Filipino masses, as well as actions taken by politicians regarding the siege. She said that “as much as Filipinos distrust this government, it is equally cynical toward those who plot to take power in their name.” Trillanes, she added, did not see that Filipinos are not ready for another extralegal means of changing the government.
Varona also said: “If there is one thing clear it is that the cold response to the Manila Pen party does not translate to support to Arroyo. The distrust of Arroyo is deep-rooted, she said, noting that this is based on such events as her 2002 vow not to run, and the Zhong Xing Telecommunications Equipment Com-pany Limited-national broadband network scandal.
Meanwhile, she said that some of the political and religious figures who had joined Trillanes ignored the fact that they said that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo stole the presidency when in fact they were part of EDSA 2. She said that the message sent to the people is that “political convictions have gone the way of the dodo, replaced by the politics of opportunism.”
All quite to the point. Unfortunately, Varona’s piece failed to mention that the events of Nov. 29 fell far short of the coup attempts to which she devoted much of her story. Was it a coup attempt in the first place?
The Dec. 6 issue of the Manila Standard Today relied only on one source for its banner story saying that members of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) had used two Makati hotels as safe houses several weeks before the Manila Peninsula siege (“Ritz, Gilarmi used as safehouses”).
The headline could have led the public into thinking that the hotels or their managements were accomplices of the CPP or Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim.
The Philippine National Police for the most part was the source of the story. It was not clear on what evidence the police are linking the CPP and Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay to the Nov. 29 incident.
Standard Today had no other source to corroborate its story. It interviewed neither the managements of the hotels nor Binay.
The Standard quoted the police as saying that Elizabeth Principe and Myrna Hombrebueno Buendia, whom the PNP alleges are members of the CPP central committee, were also part of the Nov. 29 incident. Although Principe was able to deny her involvement in the siege, Buendia was not.
Principe alleged that the military had abducted her. It was up to other newspapers to report that Buendia, who 40 years ago was romantically linked to CPP founding chair Jose Ma. Sison, just happened to be at the Peninsula on the 29th and was among the bystanders arrested by the police.
The Manila Bulletin enriched its travel and tourism section last Dec. 5 with a two-page report on the state of the rice terraces and current efforts to restore it as a heritage site by 2009 (“2000-year-old Banaue Rice Terraces is vanishing,” C-6). The report was a marked improvement from Bulletin’s usual promotional reports on places of leisure and recreation.
The Bulletin discussed, albeit briefly, why the terraces are falling into ruin. Some problems mentioned were deforestation and the cash-based economy. The article said deforestation is drying up the farms. Meanwhile, the local culture is fast disappearing because of the tourist influx.
The article said officials are trying to repair the fields with the help of locals and some non-government organ-izations. Describing the plight of local farmers, the article said officials find it hard to implement the conservation efforts because residents are too busy just trying to make both ends meet. Ironically, the terraces do not produce enough rice to sustain the families living in the area.
Last Nov. 26, The Daily Tribune published in its Metro section an advertorial without making it clear that it was one.
“Mothers know best when it comes to raising children the right way” discussed how Kumon English and Math programs could be helpful to parents and their children. As examples, two mothers whose children are enrolled in the Kumon Center affirmed the effectiveness of its programs. The contact information of Kumon Center was published.
The report was not labeled to separate it from op-ed materials. It used the same font size and type as news reports on the metro page.
Amid talk of reviewing the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), the BusinessMirror published an in-depth report last Nov. 27 on the social state of the supposed beneficiaries of the Program.
In the story “Big Failure, Little Dreams; How Carp’s failure impacts on social services and agrarian-reform beneficiaries: A firsthand account” published under its “Perspective” section, agrarian-reform beneficiaries, land owners, non-government organi-zations, international organizations, and local and municipal governments stressed that CARP was a failure because “of the absence of support services from the government.”
It also described the state of Sitio Odiong, a town of CARP beneficiaries. Despite the families’ being CARP beneficiaries, children are still forced to work to help their families survive. The report also said that many of the farmers have been forced to sell the land they had gained because they can’t maintain them.
The report quoted a study by lawyer Eduardo Hernandez and Marita Alejandrino (landowner representatives); Basilio Propongo, Jaime Tadeo, and Romulo Tapayan (farmer-beneficiaries representatives); and the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council on the problems of CARP implementation.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer banner last Nov. 28 (“UN: AFP behind killings: Report rejects RP claim of Red purge”) did not check the claims of government officials reacting to the final report by Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, on the killing of leftist activists in the Philippines.
Alston’s final report, released Nov. 26, dismissed the claim of military authorities that the killings were largely due to an internal purge within the communist movement to remove spies and discredit the government. The Armed Forces of the Philippines, according to the report, had killed the activists as part of a campaign against communist insurgents.
Reacting to the Alston report, presidential deputy spokesperson Lorelie Fajardo said that the government has a policy against extrajudicial killings. She added that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had earlier instructed Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita to handle cases involving such killings.
Ermita, the Inquirer reported, had said that committing human rights violations was “not an official policy” of the administration, and that the Philippines was “one of only five countries in the world which had ‘enshrined’ the creation of a human rights commission in their Constitutions.”
The Inquirer report, however, did not elaborate why extrajudicial killings remain rampant despite the government’s claim otherwise. Neither did the report check Ermita’s claim that the Philippines was one of only five countries worldwide which had “enshrined” the creation of a human rights commission in their Constitutions. The Inquirer could have also helped readers better if it compared the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s Commission on Human Rights with similar commissions in other countries.
Not content with mere updates from the global Climate Change Conference in Indonesia, the Philippine Daily Inquirer published a two-part series that analyzed the effects of climate change on the lives of rural folk in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), especially on those who have started rebuilding their lives after being displaced by the separatist war.
The first report, “Climate change spawns bugs, drought” (Dec. 10), looked at the proliferation of black bugs and the drought in the ARMM as the results of climate change. The next day, a second report discussed how biofuels can substitute for fossil fuels and help mitigate air pollution while at the same time causing food shortages and runaway climate change. It reported that tracts of land in ARMM, which can be used to grow food crops like rice, “are slowly being used as agro-industrial plantations for biofuels.” (“Biofuels gain, but food farms, forests lose”)
The Dec. 7 issue of The Philippine Star did not challenge an erroneous claim by Justice Undersecretary Ricardo Blancaflor on the success of the Philippines against terrorists.
After the conviction of 14 Abu Sayyaf members involved in the abduction of 20 people in Dos Palmas resort in May 2001, Blancaflor claimed that the Philippines holds the record for the most successful terrorist prosecutions in the world.
Blancaflor cited the low conviction rate of terrorists in countries such as Spain, UK, and the United States as basis. However, the Star failed to note that Blancaflor was wrong because the 14 Abu Sayyaf members were actually convicted of kidnapping and not of terrorism. On the other hand, the three countries he mentioned were unsuccessful in prosecuting alleged terrorists using their respective anti-terror laws.
While members of the Abu Sayyaf have long been classified as terrorists, their convictions could technically not be counted as successful anti-terrorist prosecutions since their crime was committed six years before the Human Security Act, the Philippines’ anti-terrorism law, was enacted.
The BusinessMirror explained the privatization scheme adopted by the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corporation (PSALM) in the case of the National Transmission Corporation (Transco). According to the “In Focus” report, PSALM would privatize Transco through a concession award, “award by the government to a qualified private entity of the responsibility for financing, operating, expanding, maintaining and managing specific government-owned assets (“One more time: PSALM set for Transco,” A1&A4, Dec. 11).”
It explained that under the Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001, the winning bidder is also subject to congressional scrutiny. Meanwhile, Article XII, Sec. 11 of the Philippine Constitution also states that the company awarded the concession should be a Filipino-owned, or at least a 60-percent Filipino-owned company. The paper also interviewed a PSALM officer, explained the bidding process, and cited the power biddings and what problems these faced.
The headline of a Dec. 6 The Daily Tribune story on the promotion of Armed Forces of the Philippines-Civil Relations Service (AFP-CRS) chief Nestor Sadiarin said Sadiarin was a general (“GMA hand seen in saving general’s promotion”). But the text of the report said Sadiarin was a colonel.
A check with the AFP-CRS website (http://www.crsafp.mil.ph/) established that the headline was correct. Nestor Sadiarin is indeed a (brigadier) general.
Only TV Patrol World provided background on one of the alleged members of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) who had been arrested at the Manila Peninsula during the November 29 siege. It aired last Dec. 7 the side of Myrna Buendia, who had been arrested at the Peninsula along with Sen. Antonio Trillanes and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim last Nov. 29. In her letter, Buendia emphatically denied that she was a CPP-NPA member and that she is the “common-law wife” of Jose Maria Sison, founder of the CPP, as alleged by the police.
TV Patrol reported that Buendia did have a relationship with Sison in the early 1960s, but that it has been four decades since then. It reported that Buendia is married to De La Salle University political science professor Rizal Buendia, and pointed out that Ms. Buendia has served in government and private agencies such as the Chinese General Hospital.
The report also explained why she was in Manila Peninsula. According to Buendia, she was just having coffee at the Pen when she heard that Trillanes and Lim were holding a press conference. Curious, she attended the conference but policemen arrested her when she was about to leave.
The only fly in this ointment was that the report got Ms. Buendia’s maiden name wrong. It is Hombrebueno, not Nombrenueno.
I-Watch News, aired on government sequestered RPN-9,again played Malacañang apologist last Dec. 14, this time in connection with the Pulse Asia survey which reported citizen perceptions that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is the most corrupt among the country’s presidents.
The report was based on the statements of Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye and the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC) who said that the survey was biased and unfair against Arroyo. No one from Pulse Asia was interviewed for its comments on the issue.
The newscast aired Bunye’s statements that the survey result was due to biased questions and the “recency effect,” which claims that people remember only recent events and not the entire performance of a president. I-Watch News also presented the VACC criteria on how to determine who the most corrupt president of the Philippines is, which states that such a conclusion must only be made after undergoing verification through the courts.
Primetime Teledyaryo’s Nov. 28 story on the government’s reaction to Philip Alston’s report on the extrajudicial killing of leftist activists in the Philippines did not ask what steps the government has taken in addressing the issue. Neither did it explain what was so “clear” about the government’s supposed policy.
Teledyaryo merely quoted Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita who said that the the Palace had already taken steps to address Alston’s findings. Ermita added that the government has a clear policy against extrajudicial killings.
In his final report released Nov. 26, Alston—who is United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions—said that the Armed Forces had killed activists as part of a campaign against communist insurgents.
TV Patrol World was so engrossed in capturing the pain and sorrow felt by a family that had lost two children in a fire that it forgot to verify some details in its Nov. 27 reports.
In its “Magkapatid, patay sa sunog,” report, TV Patrol said the fire started from a knocked-down burner (gasera) in the house of the Torres family in Tatay, Rizal. The fire killed two of the Torres children. The report showed how sad the father was when he found out that his 5-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son had died in the fire. His other children were able to get out and were in the hospital because of the burns they obtained.
In its next report (“11-anyos na bata, sinagip ang sanggol na kapatid sa sunog”), TV Patrol interviewed Alexia, the sister of the two children, on how she felt about the death of her siblings. Alexia said that after she had saved her one-year-old sister, she was about to re-enter the burning house to get her sister and brother, but that neighbors had stopped her. TV Patrol showed clips of Alexia and her mother crying in the hospital, and blaming themselves for the death of the two children.
TV Patrol may have been consistent in showing the drama, but was inconsistent in giving the age of the two children killed in the fire. Unlike in the first report, the children were said to be a 6-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy in the second report.
24 Oras and TV Patrol World provided comprehensive reports when a magnitude six earthquake hit some provinces of Northern Luzon including Manila on Nov. 27.
24 Oras interviewed ordinary people, engineers, and supervising researchers. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said this was the strongest earthquake for the year. For background information 24 Oras recalled the July 1990 earthquake, the strongest in recent Philippine history.
24 Oras used graphics to explain what tectonic earthquakes were, and located the Philippines in the Pacific Ring of Fire. It showed how the movement of the Manila trench caused the earthquake.
The reportalso reminded viewers of earthquake guidelines: what to do when inside a building, outside, and along the seashore.
Both news programs explained the effects of the different earthquake intensities, using graphics and video footage. TV Patrol in its “Ulat Kaalaman (Knowledge Report)” segment explained the difference between magnitude and intensity. Magnitude refers to the Richter scale measure of the strength of the earthquake, while intensity is the strength of the earthquake in reference to a particular affected region.
Amusment Parks are hit attractions during the Christmas season, prompting Saksi to do a report last Dec. 3 on the maintenance and safety procedures of the fun rides at amusement parks.
The report showed videos of the rides usually available in amusement parks, and included interviews with amusement park managers on the safety of the rides. It also provided such safety tips as following ride restrictions (age, height, weight, and health restrictions) and the instructions of the operators, and the use of safety equipment.
For background information, Saksi reviewed the amusement park accident last year in which a teenager died.
Saksi aired the report before the Dec. 12 ride malfunction at the Enchanted Kingdom. Last Dec. 12, one of the park’s ride stalled mid-air with 25 passengers, mostly students, on board.
ABC 5’s Sentro got its geography wrong in its Nov. 28 report about a happiness scale survey in Southeast Asia conducted by insurance firm AXA Life Asia.
The report said Filipinos are the second happiest people in the Southeast Asian region. However, the graphic presented showed the Philippines sandwiched in second place between India and China, two countries that do not belong to Southeast Asia.
ABC-5 branded the report as such due to the inclusion of six Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines in the poll. Reports from other news organizations reported the Filipinos were the second happiest people in Asia.
On the day of the Dec. 13 transport strike organized by the jeepney group Pinagkaisahang Samahan ng Tsuper at Operator Nationwide (Piston), GMANews.TV provided a backgrounder by recalling the major strikes that have hit the country since 2004. From 2004 to 2005, various transport groups launched nationwide strikes to protest increasing oil prices and to demand fare increases, the site said. The report added that thousands of commuters were affected by the 2004-2005 strikes, but that in 2006, there were no major transport strikes (http://www.gmanews.tv/story/72755/Nationwide-transport-strikes-in-recent-years). |
