Beyond economics

DRAFTED IN the wake of the bitter struggles of the martial law period, and drawing  from the lessons of  that experience, the 1987 Constitution contains provisions meant to prevent the repetition of that terrible time, and to encourage the flowering of democratic choice.

Among those provisions is that which protects, without qualification, free expression and press freedom. Although an identical provision was in the 1973 Constitution, this is reiterated in the present charter because of the martial law experience—from the lesson that free expression and a free press are necessary both to prevent authoritarianism and encourage authentic democratization.

In support of free expression and press freedom, there is also a Constitutional injunction against foreign media ownership, in recognition of the role the media can play in  preventing the return of authoritarian rule and of the power of media to help shape the conduct of government and the lives of men and women, or, at the very least, to influence their way of looking at things.

Most communication and media students know (or should know), from reading the communication theoretician Denis McQuail, that media can “repress as well as to liberate, to unite as well as fragment society, both to promote and to hold back change.” McQuail identifies the critical role of  the media in addressing the wide range of critical issues in society free men and women need to address in a democracy. Media can “attract and direct public attention,” “persuade in matters of opinion and belief,” “influence behavior,” “structure definitions of reality,” “confer status and legitimacy,” and “inform quickly and extensively.”

The social and political issues that confront nations are in these times mediated primarily by mass media, which if controlled by competing interests, for example in a society like ours, can present a multiplicity of views and options in addressing public issues from among which, theoretically, the citizenry can make informed choices.

Such issues can be part of the public agenda with the help of the media. But more than mere forums reflecting what are currently of  public interest, media are also able to substantially decide what issues citizens should be addressing at any given time.

Aside from their agenda-setting role, the media are also vehicles of culture, especially popular culture. Culture has a direct impact on politics in that it introduces and reinforces values as well as ideas and thus helps establish the norms of political discourse in society. The totality called culture refers not only to a way of doing things; it refers as well to a way of looking at things. A news report looks at events from a particular standpoint and thus helps shape people’s responses to such political issues as, for example, early in the last decade of the 20th century, the US military bases question and, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States,  and very recently, the use of the Visiting Forces Agreement to justify the country’s military re-engagement with the United States and the opening of Philippine military bases to foreign troops.

But the argument being raised to open the media to foreign ownership has been framed in almost purely economic terms. House Joint Resolution Number 1 authored by Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. thus argues that the Constitutional prohibition against foreign ownership of the media, among other provisions, should be amended to address poverty, presumably by providing employment to Filipinos.

Whether that will indeed be the case is at least questionable. The media require specialized skills both from among its technical personnel as well as reporters, broadcasters, and other practitioners, which would exclude the poorest Filipinos from the job opportunities that would be available.

But of even more import is the impact foreign media ownership will have on the state of Philippine media, besieged as they already are by such problems as the proliferation of trivia and mindless reporting, and their spotty capacity to provide information and analysis relevant to such citizen concerns as elections, inflation, human rights, and environmental degradation, among others.

The experience of other countries in which foreign media ownership has been allowed is not encouraging. The media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was once interested in investing in Philippine media, owns 90 percent of the Australian metropolitan press. This has not led to superior journalism—i.e., to a vibrant, responsible and skilled press important to a people’s capacity to make decisions—but to its opposite. Thoughtful observers and  practitioners inveigh against the dominance of trivia and the press release in the Murdoch papers not only in Australia but also in the UK and the US, where Murdoch owns dozens of newspapers.

Philippine media already have problems with trivia and press release dependence. But there is no evidence either that the entry of foreign owners will lead to Pulitzer-prize winning reporting—of which we have had examples despite 100 percent Filipino ownership. What the evidence suggests is that, driven primarily by profit and indifferent to the issues that confront the people of the host country, foreign-owned media would replicate in this country the tested formula of trivia and “public relations flackery.”

Finally, there is the view that foreign media owners would be more difficult for government to control compared to Filipino owners.  What need would there be to control foreign-owned media in the first place? Governments seek to control only adversarial, critical media. It is critical media that need freedom most.

Foreign ownership of newspapers would have an adverse impact on the quality and relevance of Philippine journalism. Philippine journalism schools, already burdened with the difficult task of helping the media improve themselves, would succumb to the pressure of graduating practitioners prepared only to report and comment on the most innocuous events while ignoring the most crucial ones.

The result would be contrary to the citizenry’s need for understanding the Philippine reality, a task already made difficult by the uneven capacity of the Philippine media to provide relevant information and analysis.

Many of the Philippine media’s problems are rooted in the ownership system in which political and economic interests are dominant. To that already problematic mix foreign media ownership would add the additional dimension of other interests. Media ownership is an issue beyond economics and can’t be left to Congress alone to decide.

 

Portions of this piece have been adapted from the author’s July 12 BusinessWorld column and lecture at the UP College of Mass Communication.