Biden has a host of issues ahead of him come January – including a healthcare crisis and ethnic and racial violence.
Category: Opinion
Media literacy should include fighting and demanding
The future of public communication rests on giving relevant media literacy. Audiences should be taught the valuable lesson of asserting and fighting for a media that we all deserve. This means fighting attempts by government to control the media, as well as demanding responsible gatekeeping by the owners of social media platforms.
Airing entertainment shows amid a super typhoon a disservice to the audience
The media should resist all commercialist trappings and not favor profit over truth-telling. Journalists and news media organizations need to brush up on the normative standards of journalism, if only to realize that bias is inherent and should not be hidden.
What is the weight of a monument?
Like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani memorial in Quezon City, dedicated to a wide segment of Martial Law martyrs from community leaders such as Dulag to fighters of the New People’s Army in resisting the Marcos dictatorship, or the 1933 Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan honoring revolutionary heroes of the Katipunan who fought for independence from Spanish rule, the Anti-Chico Dam Struggle monument represents a step foward in committing our histories of resistance to public memory in more permanent form. To demolish it would be a grave disrespect of cultural and social history at the very least.
The social basis of Filipino conservatism
By JUSTIN UMALI Bulatlat.com In the wake of Facebook’s recent shutdown of state-sponsored fake pages and accounts, it’s easy to overlook that there are other aspects aside from state fascism. Since Duterte signed Executive Order 70 in December 2018, the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) has busied itself…
Hostaging The Dead: An emergent trend in the Philippine state terror and war profiteering under Duterte
BY KOBI TOLENTINO Bulatlat.com Under Rodrigo Duterte, the horrendous act of taking dead bodies as hostages seemed to have become part of the military and police’s standard operating protocol. It happens when they deny the remains of alleged armed leftists from claimant families unless the latter has been co-opted. Hunting for bounties in a…
Proposal to regulate Netflix should be reason for MTRCB’s abolition
There should be no attempt to regulate video-streaming services like Netflix because the Internet already has several layers of filtering that can be done by clients/subscribers and service providers. Just like in other forms of media, online media or digital media should be self-regulated. Any attempt by government to regulate media content would be a violation of the constitutional provision that prohibits abridging the people’s basic freedoms.
Choose: Filipino or Filipinx?
To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.
A problematic science behind COVID-19 vaccines
Our country, with the myriad of problems in our healthcare system even before the pandemic, is simply not equipped to adequately deal with the possible harmful effects of these clinical trials on its Filipino participants. Alongside the questionable small-scale trials of the vaccine leading up to this point and the speed at which these trials were conducted (vaccines typically take years to develop), we have all the reasons not to participate, yet here we are, once again knocking on the door of quite probably another bad decision.
State of abandonment, state of terror
Looking at history, one can say that state abandonment is very much the official disposition on which the labor export system is hinged. The Philippine government is fundamentally inclined to function simply as what sociologist Robyn Rodriguez calls a “labor brokerage state,” an institutional apparatus that facilitates Filipinos’ outward labor traffic.
Journalism: The myth of neutrality and the need for impartiality
Even if this sounds nebulous, journalistic outputs are inherently biased for the truth. Journalists are therefore expected to use as sources of information the experts (i.e., truth-tellers) instead of “fake news” peddlers.