In Medias Res Archives | Page 14 of 26

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...

Our failed barricades

Most everyone cries watching Les Miz. Onstage or on screen, the drama touches off the sadness, the sense of tragedy inherent in life and human existence. Someone said online that the movie made her think of the loss of lives in Sandy Hook. At some level perhaps, all human...

Media Damnation (Updated)

The Philippine news media have a problem: how to make what’s turning into one of the most boring elections in Philippine history interesting as well as meaningful to a weary electorate that this early is already demonstrating that it will elect senators this May on the sole basis of...

Supreme Court discourse on Cybercrime Law

I think the online community in the Philippines should take some time to listen in on the presentation of the oral arguments in the Supreme Court against the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012. It is not easy listening. Not all of it is riveting or compelling. But the opportunity...

Free TV, the tabloids and elections

THE PHILIPPINE media have often been accused of bias in the coverage of elections. But inadequacy rather than partiality has been their more telling flaw. Content analysis of the coverage by the major networks and broadsheets of Philippine elections since 2007 shows that in most cases only individual practitioners...

Gunmen in the news

Such a terrible subject for this blog to take up at the start of the year! Of course, there are other issues—but this one has taken hold of the mind and the mood, as only senseless killing does, as only the deaths of children can do. Before interest in...

Abolishing the PCGG

PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on Good Government (PCGG) Chair Andres Bautista may have a point. The PCGG may have to be abolished—but only so it can be reorganized so it can do better, and not because the cost of recovering the wealth the late Ferdinand Marcos amassed during his 21 years...

Prickly points of practice

HERE, AGAIN, are discussions of points raised with me now and then by students of journalism as well as practitioners and outsiders who have to deal with them—news subjects and sources chiefly. Merely essential, not to mention unilateral, these discussions can surely use much further carrying on. Anyway, for...

Social change and the crisis of information

INFORMATION IS what the Reproductive Health (RH) and Freedom of Information (FOI) bills are all about. The first would provide women with information on their own bodies—which for too many Filipinos apparently remains terra incognita even into their adulthood—and couples with the information they need that would enable them...

Saving ethics—from the market

Second and last part THE ATTITUDE has carried over to this day such that very few media companies turn a profit and the media fraternity has remained a mixed collection of bona fide journalists, ex-journalists, para-journalists, and pseudo-journalists; in fact it is the proper practitioners in the mix who seem...