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Commentary
Philippine Media:
Two streams, one tradition
BY LUIS V. TEODORO
Bulatlat.com
(Bulatlat.com decided to
publish this piece in commemoration of the Press Freedom month. Luis Teodoro is
the associate director of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility,
editor of the Philippine Journalism Review, and former dean of the College of
Mass Communication, University of the Philippines-Diliman.)
The progressive role
of the mass media was most visibly obvious in the political crisis which began
in November last year and began to abate only after the elections of May 2001.
In the crisis investigative reports played a crucial part in documenting
the corruption and inefficiency that had taken residence in the highest offices
of the land. Indeed those reports formed part of the documentation of the
impeachment articles subsequently submitted to the Senate.
Before that crisis
erupted, however, a community of journalists united by their concern both for
the state of journalism as well as for the present and future of this country
was already focused on such issues as the Visiting Forces Agreement, the Manila
Times Libel suit and the Inquirer ad boycott, and later, the Mindanao
conflict, as well as those issues of national import but which were most
crucially felt at the local level such as agrarian reform, and community issues
like local despotism and others.
This community of
journalists is a national community which includes not only Manila-based
journalists, but also those in the cities and towns in the provinces. They are not formally organized nationally, their concern for
both the profession as well as the country being their common bond.
They include the most visible practitioners in the broadsheets as well as
those in the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and correspondents
and community journalists in all the three island groups, some of whom have
organized themselves at the local level in an effort to improve journalism
practice as well as contribute to the transformation of Philippine politics.
One group of Mindanao
journalists, for example, conducted a voter education program in the last
elections between sessions on how to improve their coverage of their
communities. Some twenty or so beat
reporters in Manila newspapers have also organized themselves into a group they
call Journalists Anonymous, in an effort to address urgent professional and
ethical problems in their respective beats.
In the Visayas, there are similar groups.
They share a common concern for both the future of journalism as well as
that of this country and are in communication with each other.
These groups’
organizing themselves, as yet at the local level, only formalizes already
existing, though loose formations. During
previous government administrations the national community of journalists I am
referring to, whose main attributes we can describe as being progressive,
professional and critical, had been as engaged in the monitoring of governance,
reporting on a broad range of concerns from human rights, workers’ issues, and
the environment – to women, children’s rights, education and other social
issues. In both the Ramos and
Aquino governments, these concerns were evident, which is to say that the
critical and progressive stream of the Philippine press has never been focused
solely on Mr. Estrada, as certain of its critics often tend to suggest.
The same stream was
as active during the martial law period – when, however, it was mostly
underground, and at best semi-legal because of government repression. In newspapers which ranged in variety from Signs of the
Times to Liberation, progressive journalists tried to provide, at
great danger to themselves, their families, their fortunes and their liberties,
the information the regulated press was concealing from the Filipino people.
In the latter days of
the martial law regime, this tradition confronted the government through open
engagement in newspapers which described themselves as “the alternative
press.” Although the use of that phrase tended to be limited to the
description of such newspapers as the Martial law period Malaya and the Inquirer,
the alternative press at that time actually included all those newspaper,
whether underground or above, semi-legal or illegal, which were engaged in
providing the Filipino people the information that was being denied them by the
government regulated media, in which most of the practitioners dutifully did as
they were told by their publishers and the Marcos government.
More importantly,
however, when we speak of the alternative press we are also speaking of the
progressive tradition, a press whose history goes back more than a hundred
years, because the alternative press and the progressive and critical are one
and the same.
If during the martial
law period there were two streams in the Philippine mass media, the alternative
on the one hand and on the other the subservient and government controlled, a
today the same streams still exist, though they are now more commonly described
as the critical and/or progressive on the one hand, and the conservative, or
evasive, or even reactionary on the other.
Most of us assume
that the latter is the mainstream. But
that it true only in the sense that it is the dominant stream during periods of
relative stability. On the
contrary, the distinction of being the mainstream tradition belongs to the
progressive or alternative stream, the history of which parallels that of the
history of the Filipino struggle for independence, justice, and social change.
Indeed, the Filipino
press was born during the reformist and revolutionary movements, first with
Marcelo H. Del Pilar’s Diariong Tagalog, and later with La
Solidaridad, Ang Kalayaan, La Independencia, El
Renacimiento, and the guerilla and underground press of the Japanese and
martial law periods. The Filipino
press was an alternative first to the Spanish colonial press, then to the
pro-American press and the US colonial government encouraged, the Japanese
controlled press, and the government regulated press of the martial law period.
Today that stream
exists primarily as the alternative to the regressive journalism represented by
the corrupt journalists whose meager talents are for sale to political and other
interests, and whoa re in residence in newspapers whose main concern is to
distort and even conceal information for the sake of the political and economic
groups they represent.
To be fair, however,
even in those newspapers, as in the government controlled newspapers of the
martial law period, there are practitioners as concerned with doing justice to
the professional demand to provide reports that are accurate and reliable, as
well as relevant and complete. We
saw some of this heartening fact at the height of the political crisis, when
even in some of the crony newspapers the professional commitment to honest and
fair reporting on the part of some practitioners could not be suppressed.
The progressive and
critical tradition lives, and it lives even in places some of us would probably
regard as unlikely hosts for independent practice, among them television reports
aired over one TV network met only with partial success, because practically all
the reporters and producers resisted censorship and engaged newsroom decision
makers in a daily effort – a veritable guerilla war – to air the news that
their professional standards demanded should reach the public.
Indeed, the adjective
progressive, aside from being another term for alternative, is at times also
only another word for professional. The
experience of the journalism community in the decades from the marital law
period to the present has in fact demonstrated that to live up to the
professional demands of the profession – to be honest as well as persevering,
to report what is happening and to comment on it as fairly and as intelligently
as possible – is at the same time to be in the forefront of the common
struggle being wages by the majority sectors of Philippine society for honest
and patriotic governance, for authentic independence, for social change.
Like those who came
before him or her, among them Marcelo H. del Pilar, Emilio Jacinto, Isabelo
delos Reyes, Teodoro M. Kalaw, and in more recent times, Armando Malay, Eugenia
Apostol, Antonio Zumel and Satur Ocampo, the progressive journalist is a
professional because committed to the basic ethical and professional value of
truth-telling.
The Filipino press
tradition is by definition progressive, having been born in the period of
resistance to Spanish colonial rule and nurtured by the Revolution, by the
demand for independence during the American conquest, and the need for accurate,
relevant information during the Japanese occupation and the martial law period.
The same
responsibility in fact drives that tradition today.
Only during those periods of relative stability, such as the decades
following the defeat of the Revolution until the Japanese occupation, as well as
that period from 1946 to 1972, and from 1986 to the present, has the
conservative tradition been dominant. But
during periods of upheaval, first during the reformist and revolutionary period
which gave it birth, the early years of American occupation, the Japanese
conquest, and the martial law period – the progressive tradition has always
been there to provide the people with the information they need to understand
what was happening and to help arm them with the consciousness that has enabled
them to defeat tyrants whether homegrown or foreign. Bulatlat.com
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