This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 12, May 1-7, 2005
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 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.) © 2004 Bulatlat
■
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