Owners and practitioners
Government control of media organizations in many countries is most often expressed through censorship. But self-censorship equally imperils accurate reporting of politics and governance even in those countries such as the Philippines, where, officially at least, there is no censorship supposedly because the media are mostly privately-owned.
Private ownership of the media alone, despite its supposedly guaranteeing the articulation of a plurality of views, does not guarantee practitioner autonomy. Direct owner intervention, in some instances in day-to-day operations, may make the exercise of that autonomy difficult. The intervention may take place because the owner is on his own initiative protecting his interests, or is acting on pressure from government, to yield to which may also be in his best interests. The political and economic interests of the owners of corporate media have too often been a barrier to the autonomy of practitioners in reporting the news and commenting on it.
Although the private ownership of institutions devoted to public interest gives rise to conflicts of interests, certain factors do tend to soften the hard edges of this contradiction in the media. In the West, the established traditions of press autonomy as well as the sensitivity of owners and editors to public opinion have created media systems in which private ownership is dominant but where, for example, anti-racism and anti-discrimination, environmental concerns, minority rights and other issues have found ample space. In recent years the same attention to such issues as the environment, gender equality, human rights, and other hitherto unpopular areas of coverage have also found space in Philippine mass media.
The vigilance of some media professionals—a vigilance based on ethical and professional commitment—has also led to such information coups as the 2000-2001 reports on the hidden wealth of former President Joseph Estrada, and more recently, the reports on the bank accounts of former Chief Justice Renato Corona despite pressures from government and even owners themselves.
In 2000, reporters and producers in a TV network in which an associate of Mr. Estrada was in charge of the public affairs division engaged in virtual guerilla warfare to get the news out despite his attempts at intervention. During that same period, independent editors and reporters managed to get the news out even in those newspapers close to Mr. Estrada and his associates.
In one instance, however, the effort resulted in a newspaper’s being deprived of newsprint by its own owner and forced to cease publication. That instance regardless, there is room for maneuver even in an apparently far from ideal situation in which the interests of media owners often clash with those of the public. One of the consequences of private media ownership is that the media are too often an arena of compromise—one reports only up to a point, or comments short of involving owner or government interests.
Difficult as it may sound given recent experience, the only way these flaws can be addressed is through self-regulation and a critical public. These flaws are not the monopoly of any single newspaper, but shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by the broadsheets and the huge networks—all of which, at one time or another, have been guilty of, among other offenses to the public’s need for information, faulty attribution, sensationalism, unfairness, lack of balance, biased reporting, and plain garden variety inaccuracy.
And yet it is this flawed system Philippine governments have been leery of. The Philippine media system assumes that private ownership by varied political and economic interests makes diverse views possible, diversity being necessary for free men and women to arrive at an intelligent interpretation of events, and if necessary to act on them. Unanimity is also subversive of that other, even more widely known role of the press, the so-called watchdog function. This is the function governments have always been sensitive about, or in extreme cases even paranoid about, perhaps because it can bring to light what governments would prefer to leave in darkness—affecting, we have often been told, even the stability of the political system.
In recognition of that potential, governments usually regard journalists in general, and critical, progressive and reform-minded journalists in particular as members of a community to be carefully monitored, and whose utterances need to be controlled. (Skepticism over press and media motives helps explain the reluctance with which, despite his pre-election stance on access to information, President Benigno S. Aquino III has addressed the demand for a freedom of information act.)
And yet not all journalists belong in the latter, suspect category. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ and other international and domestic media monitoring groups’ reports, and Philippine experience as well, suggest that only some journalists matter enough to be persecuted, jailed and even murdered. The presumption is that those journalists who take the task of truth-telling seriously can help populations make sense of what’s happening, and, no matter how indirectly, can be instrumental in mass decision-making. This makes these journalists potential lead actors in the democratization process and even in revolutions.
But through censorship, libel or “insult”, and national security laws, governments deny journalists the freedom to get the news and to disseminate it. Meanwhile, through low salaries or salaries delayed—which can amount to salaries denied if they’re not there when one needs to pay the rent—media owners deny journalists the professional conditions that permit them to perform their essential function.
The absence of government controls, however, doesn’t necessarily lead to incisive comment and world-class reporting because both require training as well as commitment, intellectual discipline, and an environment that encourages professional excellence. Journalism should be right up there with sainthood for all the demands it makes on practitioners in such complex contexts as ours.
Just like sainthood only a few are considered, with all the crap flowing at our end? One could barely distinguish news from entertainment.