Being pro-active

JOURNALISTS AND media advocacy groups have for years been urging a stop to the Philippine National Police and other government investigating bodies’ long-standing practice of presenting crime suspects to the media even before they have been charged, much less convicted. The January 25 order of Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas II for the Philippine National Police to stop the practice has been a long time coming.

Among other administrations, that of Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was an enthusiastic advocate of the practice. Mrs. Arroyo herself at times appeared in press conferences during which suspects in high profile crimes were presented to the media. As Secretary Roxas pointed out, the practice violates human rights by making the presumption of innocence and even the right to defend one’s self paper rights. Their being paraded before the media and therefore the entire country, and their inability to say anything in their defense as police and other officials regale the media with the details of “their” crimes, make the possibility of crime suspects’ being innocent seem virtually unthinkable. The perils of the practice also include the possibility of getting suspects and accusers mixed up. In one instance during the Arroyo administration, one of the whistle blowers, for example, ended up in the same line as the suspects.

Secretary Roxas did not mention it, but in addition to being a violation of the right of suspects to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the practice has also been one of the police’s ways of impressing the public with their supposed efficiency. As violative of human rights as it is, to the police and other State investigating bodies, parading suspects before the media and the public as if their guilt had been established has been a tried and tested means of getting into television and the newspapers, in the reports of which the common pitfall was to uncritically praise the police for having done a good job. The practice is in the same category of public relations as the police’s definition of what the word “solved” means (for the police, a crime has been solved if suspects have been identified).

The police and other investigative agencies’ violation of the right to the presumption of innocence is not solely their doing, however. The media also have to answer for both the provenance and persistence of the practice. To begin with, without the media’s cooperation—meaning their willingness to air video footage or to print photographs of the presentation of suspects complete with voice-overs or captions that usually fail to mention that the people in them are suspects and have yet to be convicted, and must therefore be presumed to be innocent.

The media in Cebu has demonstrated that the media themselves can simply stop airing such footage and publishing such photographs. In 2006, without waiting for the police to stop parading crime suspects before the media, Cebu TV and newspapers agreed, at the initiative of the Cebu Citizens-Press Council (CCPC), to no longer air or print video footage and photographs of crime suspects. The Cebu media’s policy has since stopped the practice in Cebu—even without the benefit of an order from the DILG.

What the CCPC initiative demonstrates goes beyond the issue itself. In the coverage of crime as in that of almost everything else including elections, the media can act pro-actively take the steps needed not only to enhance and support meaningful, accurate, and fair reporting, but also to  encourage, and even compel the police and other State agencies to respect human rights in a country where observance of human rights protocols has always been problematic.

Media pro-activity need not be limited to refusing to be manipulated into violating the rights of the subjects of their reports, however. It also includes asking the questions that could enrich reporting, or doing enough research to provide the contextual information that makes events relevant and meaningful, rather than simply reacting to what such sources as the police, or, in this election season, what information the media handlers of the candidates are willing to provide.