Bulatlat: The People’s Courageous Advocate

BY PROF. LUIS V. TEODORO
College of Mass Communications
University of the Philippines

My congratulations to Bulatlat on its fourth anniversary. 

Media practice involves the exercise of power. It is a power that can be used in behalf of oppression, tyranny, and injustice, but it is also a power that can arm men and women with the information and analysis on matters that bear on their lives, enabling them to form opinions about them, and to take action in the furtherance of those views.  Media power is itself a potentially empowering public instrument. 

Journalists, because they deal in information, can help populations make sense of what’s happening, and no matter how indirectly, can be instrumental in mass decision-making. Journalists are potential lead actors in the democratization process, social change, and even  revolutions. 

While it is  not journalists who usually  overthrow governments, they can arm the consciousness of  those who do—the citizens who, having understood their society’s as well as their own state from various sources of information including the mass media,  storm prisons and palaces.                

Since it began,  Bulatlat has used the power of interactive technology to serve the Filipino public.  It has provided  not only the critical information Filipinos need, but also the alternative analysis of political, economic, social, environmental and cultural issues that has time and again widened and deepened public understanding.   Whether writing on U.S. aggression in Iraq, the May 10 elections, or the roots of the rocketing costs of energy,  the staff of Bulatlat has never wavered from this commitment.

Indeed, where “mainstream” media have hewn to conventional wisdom, Bulatlat has taken the less traveled paths of analysis.  Where they have avoided engagement with the critical concerns of the people, and in most instances become partisans of the powerful, Bulatlat has consistently  been the people’s courageous advocate.

I am confident that Bulatlat will continue to flourish-- sustained by the people, as well as by its own commitment to the transformation of Philippine society.