Women in media
ARLENE BABST Vokey was visiting Manila from her home in Vancouver last month and on her last week got together with a group of women in media whose friendship had gone back to the seventies—Tina Monzon Palma, Maan Hontiveros, June Kiethley, Aida Sevilla Mendoza, and myself. We were not exactly in a nostalgic mood as there were more current issues and concerns to talk about. But someone did mention that the week would end with the 26thanniversary of EDSA’s first People Power uprising.
We started meeting regularly sometime in the late seventies. At some point, we decided to invite a guest we could talk to, off-the-record, if need be so we could get more information and background, get behind the scenes as it were with the powers that be.
Writing for Bulletin Today, Arlene had begun to stir the doldrums in the mainstream press with her column. She tweaked prominent noses, teased the self-important, and otherwise boldly criticized the regime, the various members of the ruling family and their cronies, showing up the sham of some government program and other political foibles. Marcos had been in power for over a decade, and claim of Martial Law as a way of building the New Society had begun to sound stale and empty.
Her pieces became the talk of the town. She thought readers wanted more. Let more women on these pages, she thought; and so convinced owner and publisher, Hans Menzi, to do just that. The paper invited Sylvia Mayuga, Ninez Cacho-Olivares, and me to go round robin with a column in the Op-Ed section. Altogether, we provided one column written by a woman each day of the week. Elsewhere in Menzi’s news empire were Letty Jimenez Magsanoc as editor of the paper’s Sunday magazine, Panorama; and Cielo Buenaventura in Who?. Both magazines gave space to pieces critical of the regime.
Women in the Philippine press preceded their counterparts in Southeast Asia, taking over special sections for society news and other women’s magazines way back in the fifties. They also carved special niches in the news industry for movie and entertainment, culture and the arts. A few, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and later, Julie Yap Daza, broke into the long held preserve of newsmen—opinion and editorial—much earlier than we did. But we had the special time.
I had no intention of becoming a political critic. I did not feel I could write about politics and shared my misgivings with Arlene who had extended the invitation to me. She assured me the page should have space for what I knew and cared about. I was raising my children, worked on an alternative school using the Montessori system, and focused TV Times which I was editing on the impact of television on children and public life.
But in a month’s time, I had written my first political piece, questioning the propaganda line of the government’s food production program, dubbed the KKK. In the two years that I wrote for the paper, people I did not know would get in touch with me through letters, yes, snail mail; or by telephone, only landline, to share their stories and experiences. I found individuals and communities who welcomed the voice we gave them, as I expanded and deepened both knowledge and understanding about the national situation. There was so much going on in the country that was not reported by the press. I found myself following leads about the activism in church groups, community leaders who helped organize farmers and fisherfolk, marginalized communities and through them stumbled upon cases of disappearances, victims of “salvaging,” and other human rights abuses. In that brief period, I discovered how so many Filipinos had become invisible because of the absence of a genuinely free press.
We would eventually be forced out of the Bulletin. Letty moved to edit Mr. And Ms. Special Edition and I Veritas Newsweekly. Other women journalists and writers found more space opening up in various newspapers and publications. The assassination of Ninoy Aquino on Aug. 23, 1983 blew the lid on the ferment of discontent, as the protest movement found more open expression in the parliament of the streets, from where the different roads eventually converged on EDSA.
The role of women journalists in this period remains unique and stand apart from the stories of other women in the country and those of women journalists in other parts of the world who suffered exile and isolation, imprisonment and death for the cause of freedom and the free press.
We were not victims. Ours was a success story. But we had plenty of help.
First off, the dictator wanted to have credentials as a democrat. We polished that claim for him. Marcos held up a copy of Veritas on the US talk show This Week with David Brinkley, to prove that he allowed a free press to criticize him. It was on this same show that he announced he would hold a snap election to prove that Filipinos would keep him in power.
The paper which gave us an opening was a redoubtable force in the press industry, owned by major player in Philippine business, who was also a friend and ally of President Marcos. Hans Menzi had volunteered to serve as the president’s aide de camp. The Bulletin was the first paper allowed to open after Sept. 23, 1972 when the government closed down all media.
In 1981, Martial Law had been lifted on paper at least, although the military still resorted to warrantless arrest and detention orders. But Menzi must have felt it was time to test the limits. And found women who were willing to do so, who in turn gained his paper more circulation.
The time was ripe for change. People were ready for the swift shift in public discourse and openly celebrated these critics. The joke then was that the only journalists who had balls were women, apologies to the men please, like Joe Burgos and others like him. But really, given such a chance, it would have been more difficult not to take up the challenge, the opportunity to explore possibilities.
It also helped that most of us did not have to fear for loss of the job. Unlike most male journalists we were not the sole breadwinners in our families, we did not depend on what we earned to keep the roof over our heads. It also helped that the custom and convention had kept us mostly out of the old boy cliques which could have made it more difficult to break away from the pattern of press controls.
We went to Catholic schools and were by most measures very much part of the establishment. There was nothing much to link us to subversion, communism or terrorist movements. We were by these standards safe. So in many ways we had it easy.
People used to ask if we were not afraid. But given the situation, it would have caused more pain to have kept to our comfort zones, to be blind and to be silent to the truths that our sources shared with us. It would not have been easy to restrain the impulse to report and to comment, to choose instead not to be involved.
Today, a generation of Filipinos can no longer remember this passage. Few of those active in the new media can be expected to imagine how a column in cumbersome print could have so quickly shaken up the status quo.
Women now outnumber the men in the ranks of the press. And they hold a remarkable presence in management positions, and not all of these are there by virtue of some family connection. In 1995, when the United Nations convened the Fourth World Conference on Women, the country was among the very few in the world where women made up more than fifty per cent of the working force.
What challenges confront them now?