Media’s bad news

A FREEDOM of Information (FOI) bill, this time drafted by the Right to Know. Right Now! Coalition, was filed through indirect initiative before the House of Representatives last July 1.

The bill incorporates provisions on which the coalition members—media and media advocacy organizations and non-governmental groups committed to good governance through, among other means, public access to government-held information—have reached a consensus. But the bill also includes in the list of information that may not be accessed exemptions the Aquino administration and some of its allies in Congress have been insisting on for the past two years, among them information on national security as well as national defense, and on executive policy deliberations.

But despite the compromise, other than verbal assurances of support from some new members of the House of Representatives and the usual reliables, there is no indication that the bill will pass as drafted, or even squeeze through the legislative mill. What’s even more unlikely is that it will be among the priority bills of the Aquino administration.

Administration resistance and even hostility to the passing of an FOI act has been expressed in various ways. But what has so far emerged as the most basic reason for it is the perception—evident in 2012 on at least four media events in which President Benigno Aquino III was critical of the news media—that the press is “already too powerful” and that an FOI act will make it even stronger.

The argument that an FOI act would empower the entire citizenry as well as the press and the media has been of no moment to this perception. Citizen empowerment would not necessarily diminish media power, if it indeed exists as the administration perceives it. On several occasions even before 2012, Mr. Aquino had already linked media power to inaccuracy, reporting trivia, and a bias against government and for bad news. It isn’t so much media power as such that Mr. Aquino fears as the irresponsible use of it—which, once an FOI act is in place, he believes will be even more pronounced.

Without articulating it in these terms, Mr. Aquino’s criticism of the media is based on his perception of the professional and ethical standards of the news media and how they’re frequently violated.

Not all his criticisms of the news media have been erroneous, misguided, or biased themselves. Inaccuracy and bias, the relentless reporting of trivia, editorializing in the news, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, corruption, sensationalism, and stereotyping occur too frequently in print, broadcasting, and even online to pass unnoticed even by the most casual observer and are correctly perceived as unethical and/or unprofessional.

Only in his mantra against “bad news” has Mr. Aquino been off, although not by much. It’s been repeatedly said that news is news, and that even “bad news” has to be reported in behalf of the responsibility to provide listeners, viewers, and readers an accurate understanding of what’s going on. But the pronounced tendency of practitioners to revel in the bad news itself contributes to the distortion of citizen perception of events, issues, and processes that concern them. Focusing heavily, or even solely, on the negative has had disastrous consequences, for example, on the readiness of citizens to meaningfully participate in elections, or in their engagement in such crucial issues as the peace process.

It is news media shortcomings that among other factors have made the passing of an FOI act difficult and well-nigh impossible during the Aquino watch, despite its importance in the making of an informed citizenry and transparency in government. Mostly unremarked as a factor in the difficulties of getting an FOI act passed in the course of a decades-long campaign, it need hardly be said that those shortcomings should be addressed, or, at the very least, acknowledged.

The failure for the third time since 2010 of an FOI bill to become law would continue to make government transparency problematic. But the equally bad news is that just as there is no indication that the 16th Congress will pass an FOI act, neither is there any indication that the news media will ever seriously address, or even admit,  their ethical and professional shortcomings in recognition  of the possibility that, after all and despite themselves,  Mr. Aquino and company may have a point.

CMFR is a member of the Right to Know. Right Now! Coalition.