Media Technology

Viewpoint : Backward into the future

Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service

NO other province marks, as Cebu does, Press Freedom Week. Come the third week of September, the Cebu media set aside fierce competition to mark together in unique ceremonies the occasion when martial law shackled, 33 years ago, liberty of expression.

"Slavery was the price tag for democratic survival … Ferdinand Marcos told us that fateful night," their 1998 pooled editorial recalled. "Revisiting [this] 'enforced unanimity of the graveyard' can be useful."

"'Salvage' [summary execution] victims and massive corruption … underscored the awesome penalty exacted when propagandists masquerade as journalists," was the shared view of five dailies, 34 radio and eight TV stations. "Today, far too many take freedom of the press as a constitutional given, 'constant as the northern star.'"

The week's activities range from forums on professional issues, journalism films, exhibits, an opening Mass, preceded by a freedom walk, plus socials. Pooled editorials are a fixture.

At the Fernan-Cebu Press Center, the 2005 sessions will cover press councils, radio commentator murders to strained government-media relations. "Three Prisms On A Troubled Craft" has an editor, a foreign correspondent, and a priest assess this complex calling.

A review of past Press Freedom Weeks reflects concerns of newsmen who cover this major metropolis.

Hoodwinking is widespread where power seekers, on front pages and prime time, besiege brittle institutions, noted "An Itch to Stampede," Tuesday's pooled editorial. Targets include the presidency, the military, the Church and local governments.

Parrot-like replays of bogus claims by power seekers flub ethical standards and spawn scandal frenzies. "This erodes our most critical asset: credibility." The editorial quoted Inquirer columnist Solita Monsod: "I want no part of what has to be called the lynch-mob mentality that seems to grip this nation ... and the media are partly to blame."

"Accuracy + balance + completeness + detachment + ethics = fairness" is how Freedom Forum puts the issue. The media must hone their ability to set off patently false public statements with facts and context. "Otherwise, politicians will continue to dupe us."

Value-rooted competence is a constant theme. "Smell the demographics," an earlier commentary suggested. "They tell [us] … a new generation of journalists are moving up the geriatric escalator into key policy posts here. Many are post-martial law baby-boomers. A number are women. Some are better trained than their elders.

"It's also a generation that wonders aloud: In journalism as in other professions, moral shabbiness exudes pus. The stench offends. If we think otherwise, we should have our heads examined."

Restoration of liberty of expression, by people power, is a "gift with strings attached," Press Freedom Week's first editorial said. "But make no mistake about it. This is not constitutional largesse for those who carry a press card. Nor are we just complacent beneficiaries of unbridled reporting or comment."

"We are, first and last, trustees of this gift," it asserted. "As stewards, we're tasked to use the latitude this freedom provides for what is just and good."

The week offers something for the young and for the graying, the 2000 editorial, "Cathedrals Without a Soul," pointed out.

"This counterpoint is deliberate… Our young have patchy memories of the dictatorship. Few recall that ordinary citizens, massed as 'People Power' on Edsa, risked all to return liberty to them. 'Utang na loob' unfortunately doesn't flourish in a vacuum."

But the elderly "bear scars from the trauma inflicted by the 'New Society's' censored rags and gagged stations." The week offers "a chance for quiet recommitment to this fountainhead of other liberties. 'Nunca Mas.' Never Again."

Renewal is anchored in "the resistance set by journalists of a tougher mould": Joaquin "Chino" Roces, Teodoro Locsin Sr., James Reuter, SJ, Jose Burgos, among others. They underscore a dog-eared but often-forgotten truism: "We journalists build on sand, if we work by values less enduring than integrity."

"Building New Cisterns," in 2003, sharply reminds journalists of their debt to forebears. Today's press "basks complacently in liberties that earlier generations of journalists fought for… [But] we drink from cisterns we never built. And we reap from vineyards we never planted."

That debt is partly paid off by unflagging dedication to daily truth-seeking -- a grueling task in a society of skewed privilege. Here, "the powerful exact what they want and the poor grant what they must."

The press must perform as a fair -- and perceptive -- one. "Journalists who come after us will also need cisterns of press freedom. We, too, must replenish that for them."

Technology, meanwhile, radically recasts the tools -- and those who work in it. E-mail and the cell phone, for example, have whittled away at the traditional face-to-face oversight that editors exercised over reporters.

"Thirty years ago, there was no Internet, no cable TV, no online newspapers, no blogs," recalls Richard Posner in his book, "Bad News." "The public's consumption of the news used to be like sucking on a straw. Now it's being sprayed like a fire hose…."

Technology merely underscores the urgency of fostering value-anchored competence in a country where the needy are bought for a pair of sandals. "Affirm that dream in a time of trouble and we need not walk backward into the future."