Notes on the education of journalists (UPDATED)
Journalism courses had been taught in University of the Philippines (UP) and other schools, among them the University of Santo Tomas (UST), since after the Second World War. In UP journalism courses were in the 1950s and the early 1960s offered in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and taught by senior journalists such as the late Armando J. Malay of the Manila Times, I.P. Soliongco of the Manila Chronicle, and Hernando J. Abaya, author of Betrayal in the Philippines, the definitive work on the political elite’s collaboration with the Japanese during World War II.
The courses they taught were skills courses, among them news and opinion writing.  But given the progressive orientation of Malay, Soliongco and Abaya, classroom discussion inevitably spilled into what today are known as critical studies, especially on the political economy of the press and mass media.  Abaya’s classes also included analyses of the content of both the Philippine and western press as part of the attempt to make reporting the news less biased and in behalf of the country’s interests and nationalist aspirations.
The students who took these courses had nearly completed or had completed the general education program, which was meant to encourage critical thought and intellectual inquiry at the same time that it sought to arm students with an understanding of the core principles and values of science, the humanities and the social sciences. It is also relevant to note that the journalism program’s provenance gave it the humanist orientation journalism training needs.
It was not until 1965 when the UP Institute of Mass Communication (UP-IMC) was founded through UNESCO auspices that the process of developing journalism education to meet what was perceived then to be the necessary task of journalism in fostering “national development” via “developmental journalism” began in earnest in UP. UP-IMC initially offered only an undergraduate curriculum that consisted of a foundation in the arts and sciences through the general education program  all students were required to complete; a skills and values component that included research, mass media law and ethics;  communication theory; and internship.
Over time the Institute, evolving into a College, also offered a Master of Arts Program in journalism, and when its department of journalism was designated in 1997 as the only center of excellence in journalism education in the Philippines, was developing a post BA diploma in journalism program, which unfortunately was scuttled because of a UP policy not to offer diploma courses beyond the undergraduate level.
A “model curriculum” UNESCO introduced in 2000 was not surprisingly similar to the UPCMC BA curriculum  prior to 2000, the planners and implementors of the curriculum being then in touch with developments in  journalism education in the US and Europe.  It was also similar to the Commission on Higher Education curriculum, the latest versions of which were scheduled for approval by that body two years after they had been completed by the CHED Technical Committee on Journalism Education. The UP program was the CHED model for years, although the latter has since gone on its own, developing a diploma program ahead of CMC as well as an MA program suited to the needs of middle level practitioners and journalism teachers.
Developing the journalism curriculum in the Philippines has not been the problem it still is in certain countries of Southeast Asia, primarily because journalism education has had a long history in this country. The problem is in their implementation, particularly in monitoring the compliance of the dozens of schools that offer journalism programs from one end of this archipelago of 7000 islands to the other to the mandated requirements for course offerings, faculty qualifications, facilities and internship.
The CHED Technical Committee for Journalism Education found that every school that offers a journalism degree program has some kind of internship. But whether the internships were achieving their purpose of acquainting future practitioners with the realities of practice, providing additional training, and reinforcing ethical and professional standards were at least open to question. Only the instances in which cynical practitioners initiate school interns in corruption are worse than interns’ being made to run for coffee or answer phones. In an effort to remedy these and a host of other problems, the CHED technical committees for journalism and broadcasting  developed guidelines which include the signing of contracts between journalism schools and media organizations.
Faculty qualifications have been defined by the CHED committees, but the schools need to be monitored for compliance. Given the number of schools that offer journalism, it is likely, however, that compliance with those qualifications will be limited, because of the extremely shallow bench of competent journalism educators in the Philippines.
Whether the curricula themselves will survive translation from the experts’ drawing boards to the classrooms was also at issue. While the content of the courses, their objectives as well as sample syllabi have been specified, defined and provided by UNESCO, and by the CHED technical committees, the very bottom line is the quality of the faculty teaching these courses, in terms of the combination of practice and academic qualifications that journalism education demands.  While the minimum requirements for facilities (internet connection, libraries and laboratories, cameras and sound equipment, computer access, etc.) are specified in the CHED curriculum as are the texts suggested for each course, compliance will again be—in fact is—problematic in third-world Philippines.
What is to be done? We have asked this same question of many other issues not only in Philippine education but in nearly every aspect of life in these isles of vexation, where practically all the public institutions that have been in place for decades have been steadily failing under the sustained assault of official incompetence, corruption, lack of vision, and hostility to a free press and free expression.
There are no easy answers, but to begin with,  those media advocacy and journalists’ organizations  concerned with the future of journalism and the democracy to which a free and competent press is so necessary  could assume the responsibility, among their many other responsibilities, of monitoring, in every locality, the schools’ compliance with the journalism curriculum.
The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, with their local chapters already in place, can provide the monitoring so sorely needed in the making of a journalism that can provide the information and analyses the citizenry needs and wants. This will require greater degrees of engagement between media advocacy and journalists’ groups on the one hand and academia on the other—an engagement that in this setting, except perhaps in Cebu city, has been limited and sporadic.
Heightened engagement with the journalism community can result in the enrichment of teaching on the one hand and of journalism practice on the other. That engagement should result in mutual consultations and agreements on the institutionalization of continuing education for journalists and journalism professors—perhaps in the University of the Philippines which already has continuing education centers for mathematics and English teachers, lawyers and doctors, among others—to meet the need for the continuing education of those journalists with limited formal training  and the education of  those without, of whom there is a surfeit in the Philippine press. Equally important, the same center can offer media literacy courses for the public towards developing the knowledgeable media public that can demand better media performance as an added impetus to the rigorous implementation of mandated curricula.
The Philippine press has been under siege for decades. The siege did not begin in 2001 but in the early 1970s when the Philippine crisis forced many journalists to look into the roots of Philippine social unrest, and when martial law was declared, journalists arrested, and press freedom curtailed.
But the most telling and most recent indication of that siege is the continuing killing of journalists for being journalists. This is part of the reality on the ground journalists need to understand and to protect themselves from. While they are not the only indication of what forces drive the Philippine press, they are a major one and will likely continue when those entering journalism school today leave it four years later.
A course in the political economy of the mass media, which is already required in the CHED MA Journalism curriculum, is equally necessary at the undergraduate level to help students identify and understand the sources of the threats to press freedom. Courses in online journalism are already in place in some schools, but the tendency to emphasize the obvious advantages of the new media must be balanced with student understanding of their downside, among them the tendency of the social networking sites to serve as substitutes for authentic engagement in social issues, and the absence of gatekeeping mechanisms which leads to loose ethical and professional standards.
Even if the culture of impunity were dismantled and the killings cease, every journalist needs to understand those threats to his or her independence and to the right of every free man and woman to meaningful information such as owner and advertiser interests, the media monopolies and the kind of political repression that has resulted in multiple libel suits and arrests during the coverage of the many crises Filipino flesh is heir to. This understanding is as necessary to the practice of authentic journalism—i.e., journalism in furtherance of democratic choice– as the skills traditional journalism educations seeks to impart, emphasizing as it does the imperative for the defense and enhancement of freedom against its legion of foes as a fundamental value in journalism.
Updated on April 24, 2012
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