Against Technicism
Media practitioners need
to reaffirm in practice the basics of truth-telling, humaneness, justice
and freedom that are at the very core of journalism regardless of medium,
and to rescue language from the misuse to which it has been subjected in
furtherance of the greed for wealth and power.
By LUIS V.
TEODORO
Posted by
Bulatlat
If all roads once led
to Rome, today all roads lead to the homeland of another empire – into the
very belly of the beast itself.
Social Weather
Stations tells us that more than a fifth of the population – 20 percent,
or some 16 million souls – want to leave the country in response to the
brutal realities of economic need, in the desire to assure themselves a
future staying in the country of their birth cannot give, or in a quest
for order the chaos and violence of Philippine society cannot provide.
Some eight million so
far have preceded them. Unless what they want to escape from abates, many
more will follow. And what they want to escape from is the crisis that,
while seemingly never so urgent as today, has in varying intensity been a
fact of life in the Philippines for over 400 years.
I was a child of the
sixth decade of the 20th century and you, children of the 21st. But
despite the years that separate us we are all children of crisis as we are
all children of these 7,000 islands.
When I began teaching
in this University as an instructor many years ago, the streets of our
cities rang with cries of “Down with Imperialism, Bureaucrat Capitalism
and Feudalism.” Though rooted in the specific realities of the
Philippines, those cries echoed a global awakening and movement for the
dismantling of those machineries of oppression that kept millions of men
and women poor and denied them control over their own lives – and the
construction in their place of societies in which no one need go hungry or
sleep under bridges.
Thirty-five years
later the world has indeed changed, but primarily in the strength of the
illusion that it has been for the better.
Twenty percent of the
world’s population consumes 80 percent of its resources, over which still
only six percent – the handful of multinationals that more than
governments now make the decisions that shape the world – have control.
Some 800 million
people go to bed hungry daily. Gas, water cannon and truncheons greet
protesters in Bogota and Genoa as they do in Manila. Thanks to the madmen
of empire, the 21st century is likely to be, as the 20th was, another
century of war.
The leaders of the
Empire have already turned international law upside down and inside out,
not only by attacking and invading a sovereign country in 2003, and by
bombing the former Yugoslavia from an industrialized state back to third
world status, but also by threatening to do the same to others, even as
they continue to control weaker, more pliant countries through blackmail,
threats and bullying.
Here, in the client
state that a hundred years ago imperialism built over the ruins of the
first Republican revolution in Asia, 48 percent of all households consider
themselves poor, as the legions of the unemployed swell in the cities and
peasant families that must hire out their labor for a pittance starve in
the countryside.
Ruled by an
irresponsible, corrupt and incompetent political class that owes
allegiance only to their own greed and the empire, Filipinos protest at
the peril of their lives. As their incomes shrink, and the effort to keep
body and soul together becomes a minute-by-minute imperative, they are
made to pay more taxes likely to go into bank accounts under fictitious
names like Jose Pidal or Jose Velarde, or at best into kickback- built
projects with swollen budgets out of which 30 percent or more goes into
the pockets of civilian and military bureaucrats who keep fleets of cars,
and maintain houses in Manila, Baguio, and Tagaytay, and even condominiums
in New York on P30,000- a -month salaries.
To the despair this
breeds, this country’s rulers respond with repression: with threats,
harassment, arbitrary arrests, bombings, massacres and assassinations, and
only lately, with a national ID system which so shames even its instigator
it had to be clandestinely signed, and which will be imposed, at immense
profit to the contractor, in violation of the very laws and mandated
processes we are told we all should obey.
The absolute wonder
of it all is not that all these are happening, but that this immense
obscenity persists without the kind of protest that the global and
national regimes of oppression, poverty, mass misery, destruction and
death demand. Do we not all suffer the slings and arrows of the outrageous
fortune inevitable in an unjust order? Do we not also bleed like those
killed in Taguig, Tarlac and Mindoro?
And are we not diminished by the murderous global regime that keeps
millions unclothed, unfed and unsheltered and condemns them to short
brutal lives so homeland moms can drive the kids to soccer practice in
their Expeditions? Surely there must be some reason other than blackmail,
the threat and actual use of force, or muscle and gunboat diplomacy that
has made so many either indifferent to what is going on, or unable to
comprehend it.
Let me venture a
suggestion why, despite the injustice, violence and misery the global and
national orders breed there is less defiance than the reality demands. The
media – the disciplines to which you have devoted four years or more of
your lives to study and master – have failed to report, much less
interpret, the world to its inhabitants.
The media could
hardly have done otherwise. In the Philippines the media are firmly in the
hands of interests whose political and business agendas are often contrary
to the imperative of truth-telling. You have all heard it said that the
broadcast media are driven by commercial interests, that it is what will
rate rather than public significance that decides which stories will make
it to the six o’clock news. The broadcast media are indeed redefining news
to mean reports that assure higher ratings and advertising revenues.
As a consequence,
broadcast news is turning into entertainment, and into orgies of voyeurism
and bloodlust as it focuses more and more on celebrities in addition to
the usual emphasis on blood and gore. Since 96 percent of Filipinos have
access to television, and since as a consequence television is the most
credible medium for some 72 percent of the population, much of the
information Filipinos receive is either in the category of fluff stories
on the state of this or that actor’s romantic life, the violence of life
among the poor, or uncontextualized reports on the latest guerilla-Armed
Forces encounter in Mindanao, which leave viewers with exactly the
impression the state wants people to have: that rather than responses to
poverty and injustice rebellions are their causes.
Reporting in print is
only a little less driven by the same commercial aims. The one newspaper
in which what appears on the front and opinion-editorial pages is subject
to the owner’s approval every day seems to be an exception. And it may
also be true that this newspaper’s difference from your favorite
broadsheet is evident in their respective attitudes towards government.
But it is equally true that they have one thing in common: neither
questions the validity of the political, social and economic systems.
The defects of these
systems are too obvious to be concealed through editorials celebrating
Christmas and Valentine’s Day and the anniversaries of this or that
association. These systems’ survival in fact depends on their capacity to
reform themselves, which is the cause to which the second broadsheet is
dedicated. But in practice, the consequence is a refusal, or inability, to
look into the root causes of this country’s problems, and to see them
merely as the results of mistaken policies and bureaucratic bungling.
The natural aversion
to the effort that providing context entails is reinforced by the
logistical demands of keeping expenses down and reporters busy. A 2000
study by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility thus found that
only 26 articles – and these included columns and editorials – out of over
6,000 generated in five broadsheets during the March-July period that year
provided some kind of backgrounding on the ongoing Mindanao
conflict.
Globally the illusion
is that audiences have become empowered through their supposed capacity to
choose from among media old and new as well as among programs. But it is
still only a handful of corporations – seven as of last count, down from
nine a decade ago – that control practically all of the entertainment and
news that blankets the planet daily, whether via print, tapes, discs, or
broadcasting. They provide choices and alternatives indeed – but only from
among options they decide and they determine. As a cable subscriber, for
example, my choices are limited to the movie and news channels, all of
which offer a uniform view of events, without an Al-Jazeera among them.
Choosing between CNN and Fox isn’t much of a choice, and is much like
choosing between the Cartoon Network and the Disney Channel.
But the global media
corporations, like our own homegrown ones, also claim to provide only what
people want – after decades of developing those wants through trivial
reporting, a focus on actors, rock stars, and kings, queens and princes in
the guise of human interest; a refusal to provide readers and viewers the
background information the best practice of journalism demands; and
steadfast celebration of the virtues of capitalism and the inherent right
of the militarily superior country to bomb and threaten those countries
that don’t agree with it; to prevent social change of any kind that’s
contrary to its economic interests; and to generally do what it pleases
regardless of international law.
A study by the
Fairness and Accountability In Reporting media advocacy group of TV news
reporting thus found that over 90 percent of those interviewed over US
television networks, prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, were
government officials or belonged to pro-war groups.
The New York Times,
in a rare instance of self-criticism, admitted last year that it had not
been as rigorous in its reporting as it should have been, and thus ended
up supporting the mythical case for the invasion of Iraq because it
supposedly possessed those weapons of mass destruction that have never
been found. By the time the New York Times had criticized itself –
without, however, apologizing to the people of Iraq – a hundred thousand
civilians were dead and an entire country including its cultural heritage
was in ruins.
Only mostly Internet
sites have provided alternative views on such issues as globalization and
war. But even in the new media right-wing sites bankrolled by the
corporations have proliferated, thus threatening to overwhelm the
alternative sites that have tried and are trying to balance the skewed
reporting in favor of empire and war dominant in the global news
organizations.
Beyond those obvious
instances in which a global audience is mesmerized and misled by trivia,
distorted and biased reporting and outright disinformation – which those
in journalism know as the manufacture of false information to influence
opinion along predetermined lines – there is as well the daily assault on
the senses of those who have access to television and print: the
unremitting pounding into millions of heads of the idea that capitalism
and its harvest of misery under the aegis of world empire is the best that
mankind can ever hope for. After all, is this not, as postmodernism coyly
claims, the end of history as it is the end of everything else except
capitalism? Therefore, if you happen to have the misfortune to be born
poor in a poor country and not rich in a rich one, the only thing you can
do is to move to a richer one, where, among other options, you too can
labor as a domestic or scrub bedpans for dollars, yens or euros.
What is the
journalist, the filmmaker or anyone else involved in the media and
communication professions to do given the disorder that reigns both at
home and in the world? I suggest that it is exactly what he or she has
been trained to do, and that is to report on the world and to interpret
it. That is the media practitioner’s first duty, just as his or her first
loyalty is to the facts. The media practitioner true to these first
principles through the exercise of those skills in research,
documentation, analysis, and writing and expression paradoxically becomes
more than just a skilled technician. Falsehood, distortion and bias are
after all the foes of the moneybags and militarists whose unholy
partnership with each other as well as with local tyrants has shaped both
Philippine society and the world.
At the same time, and
even more critically, the practitioner needs to restore integrity to the
language by being as precise and as exact in its use as journalism
demands. He or she must oppose the debasement of language that now reigns
in western media: that debasement which has made “militant,” and
“liberal” and “leftist” and “radical” into terms of resentment, and which
distort the meanings of “fundamentalist” and “terrorist” to apply solely
to the enemies of empire though they apply with even greater force on the
empire itself and its client states.
Media practitioners
need to reaffirm in practice the basics of truth-telling, humaneness,
justice and freedom that are at the very core of journalism regardless of
medium, and to rescue language from the misuse to which it has been
subjected in furtherance of the greed for wealth and power.
Only rigorous
commitment to the truth-telling that is journalism’s first and last
responsibility, and as a consequence, to reporting and interpretation
beyond the conventional, can make better media. For media practitioners,
researchers and scholars, the struggle for a just society through better
media is of course first of all here, in this country’s newspapers, radio
and television, and in the Internet. But there is also room in that
struggle for the involvement of those who, for whatever reason, choose to
live elsewhere, or have to.
The globalization of
resistance is one of the answers to the globalization of oppression and
exploitation. The Internet, for one, now provides not only the opportunity
to remain connected to the country of one’s birth, but also to interpret
events in it to global and Filipino audiences. By doing so through
whatever medium or whatever means, you would still be part of the epic
effort of the Filipino people, now in its 135th year since 1872, to find
their place in the world as free men and women.
Both the global order
and the Philippine one need to be understood by the people in their
millions who can collectively transform societies. By interpreting the
world media practitioners can also help change it. You now have the power
to do so, and I hope that you will use it. Bulatlat
(The author, a
professor of Journalism at the University of the Philippines College of
Mass Communication where he served as dean for two terms, read this paper
at the college’s commencement exercises last April 24.)
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