Anomaly’s child

MUCH OF the post-2010 expectations of the press and media community critical of the Arroyo administration’s antagonism to free expression and press freedom have not been realized during the Aquino III administration.

Neither institutional transparency—the bureaucracy’s sustained commitment to the right to information as State policy—nor institutionalized openness, or the enshrinement in law of that right, is in place. What are now in place are the very opposite. At least two laws that contain provisions restrictive of access to information, free expression, and press freedom passed Congress and were signed by President Benigno S. Aquino III in record time: the Data Privacy Act last August, and the Anti-Cybercrime Act this September.

As for the Freedom of Information Act, the campaign for which is approaching two decades old, there is no sign that it will ever pass during Mr. Aquino’s watch. One senator is said to have even declared  in an unguarded moment that there is no need for an FOI because of  Mr. Aquino’s supposed commitment to openness. Even granting the latter assumption, however, the fact remains that Mr. Aquino won’t be President forever, unless he’s not telling us something and secretly intends to do a Marcos. As the entire country painfully learned during the Arroyo regime, access to information has to be in law, being too important a process to be left to the whims of whoever will be elected to the Presidency.

The killing of journalists, meanwhile, is continuing, with 127 killed for their work since 1986, 10 of these since Aquino III assumed the Presidency in 2010. Harassments and threats including the filing of libel suits to silence critical practitioners are similarly continuing, underlining the persistence of an environment of uncertainty and danger to the lives of journalists and media workers.

From practitioners in the community press also comes the information that the military is continuing to present before various groups its 2005 “Knowing Your Enemy” slideshow, which includes media organizations in its list of “Enemies of the State,” and worse, that some practitioners are still in the Orders of Battle of some military units operating in the communities.

The trial of a veritable handful of the hundreds suspected of  masterminding, implementing and otherwise participating in the worst attack on the press and media in history—the Ampatuan Massacre of November 23, 2009—is proceeding so glacially some witnesses have been killed with similar impunity. There is no indication in sight that the cases of those in State custody will be concluded in this lifetime, or even that all of those being sought for involvement in it will ever be apprehended, indicted, and tried.

If very little has changed in the press and media environment, neither has much changed within the press and media themselves. The same reports and complaints of ethical lapses and bad practice are being made by the subjects and even sources of the press and media as well as by ordinary citizens.

Neither corruption nor plagiarism, nor cluelessness about the most important issues of public concern, have so abated their practice is now limited only to senators of the Republic. On an almost daily basis the same conflicts of interest, absence of contextualization, and worse, inaccuracy and lack of fairness as well as outright bias  so evident the practitioners and media organizations involved have become the laughing stock of social media users, persist.

During the last two years since the change in administration, the country witnessed, among others, an airport brawl between a tri-media columnist and a group of actors triggered by his taking photographs of a shouting match over luggage, followed by the former’s brothers’  threatening over their TV program the actor involved and his wife with physical harm; several cases of plagiarism including one by a senior journalist whose personal antagonism to the family of President Aquino has blinded him to the imperatives of journalistic fairness; a broadcast anchor refusing to call by name the second highest official of the land, but calling the same official names in support of her husband’s impending appointment to a cabinet post; and the abundance of made to order reports on how one senator was mobbed by admirers during a visit to a Book Fair, and on her views on  the law, love, marriage, and sex.

Much earlier, a former high official returned to broadcasting with hardly a pause from his official duties, where, from 2010 onwards, he has been reporting on and making snide remarks about the administration that replaced the administration of which he was a part. And, lest we forget, the practitioners active in the campaign machineries of the candidates for President in 2010 but who were still writing their columns throughout the campaign, have since been restored in the local pantheons of respectable  journalism with few apparently being the wiser—where, however, they continue to serve the same or other masters.

The persistence of these problems in both the media and press environment as well as in the press and media themselves have been blamed on, among others, the failure of the journalism community to unite behind the demand for an FOI and to thereby convince the honorable gentlemen of Congress of the need for it. The continuing perils faced by those working in the community press have been blamed on practitioners’ lack of appreciation of the dangers involved, or in their not being armed.

Corruption and conflicts of interest have been blamed on the inadequacy of, or lack of training among, those practitioners who, it is alleged, became journalists while on their way to the corner store. Impunity itself has been blamed on journalists’ lack of training as well, on their being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or on their failure to scan their immediate surroundings for possible threats.

There is some truth to at least some of these supposed reasons for the present state of the media and press environment and of the press and media themselves. But these reasons almost uniformly blame journalists, as if their reporting and commentary were the decisive factors in shaping the present, whereas the unpleasant truth is that, to begin with, neither the fundamentals of the State nor those of the media have changed.

What has given birth to the present sorry state of the media and press environment is the reality that despite the country’s frequent elections, not only the same class but practically the same families have so monopolized power in this country for decades and benefited so immensely from it that they have developed a vested interest in keeping not only the damaged and damaging political, economic, and social systems intact, but also the citizenry in their accustomed state of cluelessness about what their supposedly chosen representatives and other leaders are doing with the treasury and the State.

It explains their aversion—no their repugnance—to an FOI law and their wholehearted embrace of the Data Privacy and Anti-Cyber Crime Acts, and their secret antagonism to press freedom and free expression, despite their frequent lip service to both as democratic imperatives. It also helps explain the reluctance of the present administration to dismantle the paramilitaries succeeding administrations abetted, funded, protected, and trained, despite their role in the violation of human rights and in the Ampatuan Massacre.

On the other hand, who but the elements of the same elite are the owners of the media—owners who in more cases rather than few keep practitioners in uncertainty and even poverty by refusing to regularize their employment for the sake of job security or to pay half decent wages—or, as in so many cases in the communities, to even pay wages at all, expecting practitioners to survive on advertising commissions and even on corruption? Most of these same owners also ignore the dangers the journalists and media workers in their media organizations face, refusing to provide hazard pay, safety training or even funeral expenses, even as they use the media and compel practitioners to further their economic and political interests, thus creating among journalists inevitable conflicts of interest.

The child of this mother anomaly in the State and the media is the anomaly we know as the Philippine press and media, in which, despite the stubborn persistence of dedicated, honest and skilled practitioners, a system practically custom-built for the opposite, and which not only allows but encourages impunity, and makes conflicts of interest inevitable, pulls everyone down to the level of the stupid and the corrupt who use the press and the media for the most self-serving ends and who daily debase and shame the profession.

There is no lack of observers and practitioners as well as partisans of the present administration, who will argue the opposite, however: that the press and media environment has improved since the dark days of the Arroyo regime, and that the press and the media themselves have been, in general, accurate and fair, as well as informative and professional.

The numbers and the social evidence speak for themselves. Journalists are still being killed, harassed, and threatened, and in addition must now contend with the added difficulties of obtaining the information on which their profession depends created by the Data Privacy Act, and the additional perils of criminal libel over the Internet, where many of them have a presence as bloggers and social media users together with millions of ordinary citizens.

Above all this, however, is the overwhelming evidence of how inadequate the press and media have been in remaking Philippine society. Press freedom and free expression are explicitly protected by the Constitution on the assumption that they are crucial to the democratic and development discourse: press freedom is after all not its own reason for being, but only a means to an end. But its practice is apparently hampered in reality by constraints other than legal ones: by the extra-legal, extra-Constitutional limits created by the dominance over the State and the institutions of Philippine society of a few families whose rule has made the country the fragmented, damaged entity it is today.