In Medias Res Archives | Page 23 of 26

What the public wants

Was it really necessary to devote so much airtime and space to the incident? And on the very same day too as the resumption of the Corona impeachment trial, and other events that do matter?

AFTER A break of five weeks, the trial of Renato Corona resumes Monday (May 7), its momentum, you’d imagine, naturally diminished. In fact a poll in mid-break already showed it distantly low in the priority of popular concerns—in the minds of a mere 13 percent of the respondents. That...

Lessons in transition

The People Power events of February 1986, which brought down the Marcos dictatorship, were the first of such political events to be televised on real time by then newly launched 24/7 all news channel CNN. The drama on EDSA, the nuns holding up flowers and rosaries as tanks approached,...

Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy

THERE ARE errors of malice and errors of incompetence in the practice of journalism. A reporter may deliberately distort a story to manipulate readers, viewers or listeners into interpreting an event, a statement, or anything else in the news according to his/her or his/her media organization’s biases—or to those...

Redemption

I ENTERED St. James Academy in June 1957 as a high-school freshman at the premature age of eleven, and immediately felt overextended, overmatched, absolutely out of my class. An extension of Maryknoll (now Miriam) College and run by the same order of American nuns, St. James spoke English, and...

Education for democracy

SOME 500,000 Filipinos (most of them women, incidentally), graduated from college between March and April this year. They will compete for the limited number of jobs available in a stagnant economy with the estimated half a million other college graduates from past years who’re still unemployed, says IBON Databank and...

Changing with change

Second and last part TO SWITCH media or not seems to have become a non-issue for newspapers. It has been decided by arrangements beyond their control: to not switch is to perish – in time. The debate has now beenultimately narrowed andconfined to when, not if, that time will come.

Murder as a way to fame

I am not questioning the news worthiness of the case. The loss of young lives will be a story that strikes a most responsive chord even as time moves us away from the tragedy. But we do not need the kind of live updates on the trial if it...

Alternatives

SINCE 1986, conventional wisdom in the Philippines has paid tribute to the role of the “alternative press” in the overthrow of the Marcos regime that year.

The fading print (updated)

AS IT does every year around this time the Philippine Press Institute, the national organization of newspapers, will meet in a general assembly from the 23rd to the 25th, this time to discuss what might seem a curious issue: “Media accountability and public engagement.”