In Medias Res Archives | Page 8 of 26

The High Court on the Ampatuan Case

The Supreme Court (SC) issued a resolution last December 10 providing guidelines that are clearly designed to hasten the conduct of the trial of the accused for the massacre in Maguindanao in 2009. Into its fourth year, the trial has not sustained media attention that it deserved. For very...

Rousing the media audience

ALTHOUGH SOME communication scholars take exception to the findings of a decades-old study that condemns the Wile-y Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon for its violence, other studies have since validated the warning that violence in the media not only tends to be imitated; it also fosters the misconception that the violence audiences...

Problem solving journalism

THE FIRST blog for 2014 may be a good time to suggest once again that we need to change the way we do journalism. This is not the first time I have echoed the call heard in other press communities to re-think and revise the notions of news, of...

The never ending story

The elections of 2013 were over only seven months ago. But preparations are already under way for the elections of 2016, when the electorate once more goes to the polls to elect the President of the Republic and other national officials. Speculation is already rife on who the...

Word War on Impunity

The exchange between press freedom advocates and Aquino officials reflects the underlying adversarity inherent in media’s relationship with government. But the talk on the issue of impunity has become a touch too hostile and a tad too touchy; with a superfluity of words that cannot help the cause, as too...

Murder as perennial as grass

UNLESS THE Aquino administration rouses the Philippine National Police from its lethargy and forces it to find and investigate the killers of journalists; unless it lights a fire under the Department of Justice to see to their prosecution; and unless it does something to encourage the courts to try...

Interview Ethics 101

THE INTERVIEW is both a method journalists use to elicit information and/or opinion, as well as a journalistic form in itself. Some individuals are interviewed because they’re in the news and are the focus of wide public interest. But on a daily basis, journalists interview sources either to obtain...

Into the breach

Leyte and Tacloban are the most devastated among the provinces and cities in the path of "Yolanda" (international name “Haiyan”) and its 300+ kilometer-per-hour winds. Unlike such other provinces as Antique, both the city and the rest of the province were particularly unprepared. Days after Tacloban was practically destroyed,...

Plagiarism: No ‘Ifs,’ ‘Ands,’ or ‘Buts’

PLAGIARISM IS theft. Both as a form of dishonesty and for its consequences, the practice of copying someone else’s ideas and written work and passing them off as one’s own is one of the worst ethical offenses one can commit in academia, literature, public life, and journalism.

It’s not rocket science

Journalism ethics is neither nuclear physics nor brain surgery. Ethical compliance is not as complex or as difficult as suggested by the practice of some journalists who, among other habits, are predictably biased for this or that individual, group or agency, or who succumb to corruption and conflicts...