Media in Southeast Asia

Below is a speech delivered during a seminar-workshop on “Media ownership trends: protecting and promoting the diversity of media platforms in Southeast Asia” held in Bangkok, Thailand last Jan. 31, 2012.

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GOOD MORNING!

It is my pleasure to represent my colleagues, the members of the Board of Trustees of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance in welcoming you to this discussion of media ownership in the region. In the world of old media as in the new, ownership plays a critical role in the news business and this discussion should allow us to exchange views about how media ownership affects press freedom issues in the region.

And so, on behalf of SEAPA’s Board and Secretariat, I thank you for your presence this morning.

 

Media in Southeast Asia

The landscape of Southeast Asia presents a diversity of political and governmental systems, of religions and faiths, culture and custom, history and society. Some experts have said that nothing really holds Southeast Asia together. Geography has changed, and land bridges no longer bind the islands and archipelagos to the continental land mass.

But the region has learned how to become one, with the shared desire to be joined, expressed by a handful of national leaders who saw the gains in collective strength as contributing to each state’s national good. In the course of time and history, a greater solidarity has emerged among the region’s communities who have opted for a system of freedom and democracy.

SEAPA took this same impulse into the field of press and news – testing core values in the practice of journalism test across borders wherever democracy is in place. Elections, even in varying degrees of quality, is a unifying experience established. The exercise carves out some kind of common ground where stakeholders and constituents can share and learn from one another. The same can be said about the system and culture of news.

Journalism, the gathering and distribution of news for a community or country, relies on some basic conventions. Press communities, coming from different social and political backgrounds, find that there is always much to talk about, to share and discuss. That conversation flow confirms the place of news in ASEAN nations.

Where press freedom is adopted in the national law, however, one finds a greater solidarity of values and a greater similarity of systems. It becomes helpful then for the member organizations of SEAPA to be in touch with one another, either to share lessons and to draw from a bank of best practices.

The SEAPA network allows us to build up experience in the many aspects of journalism and news that can be useful, despite the differences that remain.

And so we are always eager to meet and reach out to new partners – and these do not have to come only from the media. Journalism is enriched with interaction with experts from other fields, civil society leaders, the academe as well as the legal community.

Your attendance this morning is a hopeful signal that the network can make a difference for the future of journalism in this region.

 

Challenges to Press Freedom

To begin, I have been asked to review in brief the challenges that confront the growth of press freedom and the strengthening of news organizations in Southeast Asia.

I could refer you to one or two reports that are released annually by media watch dog organizations, listing attacks and threats against journalists and media workers around the world. These include the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in New York, the Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) in Paris, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), as well as SEAPA.

The Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility (CMFR) in the Philippines provides an analytical framework for its data base, and its research inquires into cases of physical violence and killings, libel and defamation, and bills and laws that curtail press autonomy, conduct of trials of journalist killer suspects, including the suspects in the killing of 32 journalists and media workers in Ampatuan in 2009.

All of this information are available on the Internet. Most of you can go directly to these sources.

 

Press Freedom and Democracy

I do not think it would help our discussion to just review lists.

The regional platform that SEAPA has provided for this work is now on its twelfth year. With its member organizations, it keeps in touch with news about the press and the difficulties imposed on the business of news. This work can only be seen as a necessary task that relates to the consolidation of democracy in the region.

The inquiry about how well news has fared leads, one would think, to the primary question “How well has democracy fared?”— in the region. How well have the controlled systems held sway in the restricted countries of Vietnam, Laos and Burma.

If we ask this question, we should also follow up with the question: How well have the democratic leaders held to democratic values, once elected, in, say – Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines?

In Malaysia and Singapore, concern should focus on the expansion of space for the opposition, so that elections become more open. How much space is given to public gatherings and assemblies that will express political sentiment as necessary; or for news that will allow citizens to engage better for voters in the next election?

All these questions are difficult to answer, and we cannot pretend to even try to sketch our responses. I raise this point only to remind us all about the conceptual link between democracy and press freedom; and that we cannot discuss one without understanding the other.

 

Politics and Democracy

Politics underlies a major challenge to press freedom and the autonomy of news organizations. Perhaps, because of the relatively brief history of democracies in South East Asia, the institutionalization of press freedom has not happened with speed or ease, even when the country has established an electoral system.

In fact, democratically elected leaders can turn dangerously autocratic and resort to means of control that includes the employment of politically motivated charges filed against journalists; or worse, the employment of vicious and violent attacks against members of the press. Or they can slip into uncaring indifference, the pernicious neglect of necessary reform in various aspects of governance.

Through such neglect, certain conditions become entrenched as “a culture of impunity.” Without corrective action, these conditions allow killers, including journalist killers to go un-punished. The manipulation of court systems to defend suspect killers delays court trials, despite the weight of evidence showing guilt and culpability.

Legal chicanery is employed to benefit the rich and powerful accused, or those with connections to power. Without money, the poor who are accused have no one to work the system for their benefit. The culture of impunity weighs more heavily on the local level, where small news organizations lack the capacity and resources to fight back.

Even with democratic, free and fair elections, leaders that allow such systems to persist, assure the weakening of democracy, if not its failure, where he or she presides.

 

Technology and the Changing Media Environment

Technology has introduced dramatic changes in the field of communications.

Our inquiry must take account of the growth of social media networks and the engagement of citizens in the sharing of their news and the creation and delivery of news as it happens. More and more studies show how old media can join the new to create better and stronger platforms for news. But not without a difference. The challenge of social media lies in the dynamic that s the very nature of news. . If we ask the younger generation what they think news is, those of us who grew up with the established journalistic conventions of news may not recognize what they are talking about. The challenge is to review what conventions still apply to make sense in this new world and what we need to hold on to so that journalism retains its assigned function in a democracy.

This challenge is an opportunity. But it is a difficult one that we must resolve to face.

The power of social media has been projected by the events of the Arab Spring. But there are many other places where the exchange on these media raise nothing more than so much empty chatter, the frittering of exchange to serve one purpose only – I want the world to know about me.

There may be nothing really wrong with that. But it would be a waste of such power if there is no effort to use these tools for the highest purposes of human communication, to test ideas and to share the ideals that ennoble humanity.

 

The Press and Education

The growth of the free press is tied inextricably to the success of educational systems and the creation of a critical mass who use the news for civic action, political reform, policy review and policy change. Where educational systems fail, the free press can only move with the glacial pace in terms of genuine democratization. So yes, we need elections, but we also need much more than elections to make real democracy. Such changes require both economic and social capital.

 

Economic and the Equality Factor

Economics and press freedom? Where democratic governments fail to distribute the benefits and wealth of the land, the system is weakened from within. Freedom to be meaningful must be joined with equality before law, equality of opportunity and access.

Everywhere in the world, the most established democracies are imperiled by financial crisis and economic stagnation. Even in developed democracies, the growing gaps between rich and poor create undemocratic conditions – the growing inequities that do create two different worlds in one state.

The poor welfare of employees of small news organizations are an issue constituting a threat to the quality and the freedom of the press.

So the challenge to press freedom should include economic growth that benefits the poorest of the poor, including those working in the media.

 

The Press as a Business

Elections that put up only empty choices, or limits the choice to the lesser of evils, are a perversion of democracy. The press that sees the publication and distribution of news merely as a business succumb to a system that is satisfied only with journalism in form.

The purpose of the press is to create a forum for the exchange of views, a flow of information and news that will help to grow citizens who can think and evaluate, and thus make sound decisions on matters that affect their lives.

For these purposes, liberal constitutions provide great protections for press freedom. To function only and primarily as business, journalism may be satisfied with giving the audience what they want, and not what they need as citizens.

This overview is useful to a point.

After all, the growth of press freedom in Southeast Asia is measured from day to day, and those monitoring attacks and threats can map the landscape in such a way as to require a range of responses from advocates.

Political activism is punished in all media where repression is official policy.

Continuing censorship and repression may be found in all countries, both democratic and controlled. Human rights defenders have been kept busy in almost every SEAsian country as governments, elected or not, turn to this or another instrument of censorship.

In various degrees, the laws in democratic Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines make it easy to take journalists to court and to jail them. Libel and defamation. Religious Issues. These curtail press freedom in significant ways and there is no quick remedy for any of these challenges. In many places, the high and low courts deny justice to journalist victims and their families. In the long term, a more active legal community specializing in media defense may make a difference.

Which is why SEAPA has actively cooperated to establish a regional network of lawyers who will be able to observe trials or be available where they are needed to assist besieged journalists..

In the Philippines, the culture of impunity, which involves poor police investigation and weak court systems, persists to encourage more killings, despite a change of government and a president who had promised to turn the page on impunity. The law itself has become an instrument of impunity, given the ability of well paid lawyers defending those involved in killings and other attacks to delay and thus deny justice to victims and their families.

 

Internal Weaknesses

The growth of a free quality press has been a painful struggle. The commercialism and profit orientation ruling in the favor of sensational and unethical conduct in the coverage of the news raises the inquiry on another level.

How well have the free press systems in the democracies of the region served the needs of their public. Even those engaged in media defense often wish they did not have to defend press scoundrels who are hauled to court.

CMFR has pushed the idea that journalists must earn public support with the kind of service they provide to the public. But what kind of public support can we count on, if people do not feel the press is worthy of their defense.

When the magic of democracy springs have waned, people will ask whether a free press really makes a difference in their lives.

We hope that when that time comes, the press in SEAsia can claim protection from the public they say they serve. The question is: Is journalism these days still public service?

Are the poor and their interests included among those served by our free press?

We shall not try to answer this question. But let’s think on it anyway and keep the question to heart, as this in the end may determine how well we respond to the challenge of our times.