CSR and the media

Although the Philippines is a particularly disaster-prone country year ’round, both because of its geographical location (it sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire” and is directly in the path of Pacific-generated storms) and the flawed and even non-existent environmental policies of the governments that have ruled it, it is during the rainy months of July to September and even beyond when typhoons, floods, and landslides decimate entire communities.

So vulnerable is the Philippines to natural disasters that, with 2,360 deaths, it led all other countries in the number of people who died from disasters in 2012. It was ahead of China, which was second with 771 deaths, according to the non-governmental Citizens Disaster Response Center (CDRC). But the Philippines was second to China in terms of the number of people displaced by typhoons, landslides, and floods, lost their belongings and homes and/or suffered various economic losses. (Twelve million people were so affected in the Philippines compared to 43 million in China.)

This is the context in which, come the rainy season, some of the biggest media organizations launch disaster relief and even rescue operations—and make sure that their publics learn about it, through, naturally, their own capacities for disseminating the information.

Although it is seldom so described, these activities could be explained as indicative of Philippine media organizations’ commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR is part of a business model intended to demonstrate that corporations are not solely devoted to profit-making but are also interested in promoting the social good. Oil companies take pains to show that they’re guarding the environment, for example, and drug companies that they’re promoting public health.

CSR does have an impact on the main goal of corporations, which is that of profit-making. CSR is after all a business model, and businesses are primarily focused on profit. Public awareness and appreciation of their supposed concern for the environment, consumers and the general public does diminish popular antipathy towards the biggest corporations in some countries, and contributes to public approval and hence, to product patronage.

CSR is in brief a public relations strategy. Made popular in the 1960s and 1970s, it seeks to correct public perceptions that corporations are impersonal and uncaring institutions driven solely by greed.

The same impulse presumably drives such Philippine media organization activities as engagement in disaster relief and rescue operations, providing scholarships to poor and deserving students, and even serving breakfast to needy schoolchildren and helping citizens patch up their torn and leaking roofs in the aftermath of torrential rains and typhoons. Some of these involvements are year ’round affairs, while those having to do with disasters are necessarily seasonal.

The strategy, which we can assume has been vetted by the media organizations’ public relations consultants, does help fill such well-documented gaps in government services as disaster relief and rescue operations, assuring access to education, meeting the nutrition needs of school children, and so on.

What’s problematic is these activities’ being made part of the news of the day by the media organizations who engage in them. Non-media corporations have to fight for space and air time when it comes to promoting their own CSR campaigns, their success in getting into the news pages and/or the six o’clock news being dependent (quite apart from those instances in which they pay corrupt media practitioners for the privilege) on the compliance of their press and other releases with standard news conventions, among them newsworthiness, accuracy, fairness and balance, etc. With their inherent advantages, media organizations can choose whether to ignore those standards or not, as a result of which, in those many instances when corporate interests in terms of boosting circulation, ratings and, therefore, advertising revenues become the dominant concerns, what is presented as news can be, and often is, merely self-serving, and manipulative.

The particularities of CSR practice among media organizations in the Philippines—which have spun off from the public service programs that in many ways are also meant to suggest the media organization’s commitment to public good at the same time that they do provide the services government is mandated to provide but doesn’t—do bear on questions of ethics and compliance with professional standards.

And yet, ethical practice and adherence to professional standards in reporting, comment and analysis, have been part of the responsibilities of the media long before CSR became a popular mantra among corporations, and are in fact inherent in media practice, whatever the specifics—whether corporate, governmental, or public—of the way the particular medium is organized.

There is nothing wrong with media organizations’ providing relief goods to stricken communities, organizing rescue teams, providing scholarships, or patching roofs and serving breakfast. These are, however, only additional responsibilities some media organizations have assumed in the context of government inefficiencies in the particular conditions that obtain in the Philippines. The media’s main responsibilities are still those of presenting the news as accurately, as fairly and as completely as possible, and providing the commentary and analysis that will help their audiences gain a better understanding of the events around them—including, in this rainy season, the many disasters Filipino flesh is heir to.