Journalism misgivings

THE NEWS profession used to be a fairly clear path. Since I began walking it nearly a half-century ago, it had not until recent years posed any problems I could not sort out for myself. Now it’s no longer such an easy walk; it has become so laid with traps one can no longer proceed on it with any confidence without re-plotting—that is, if one decides at all to proceed.

I confess having second thoughts myself, second thoughts about the very basics of the whole business—what it’s really about, whether it has had to change with time or whether I in fact misunderstood it from the start. In other words, it’s for me a rather serious re-examining, one that goes into doctrines and traditions, into the very rock on which the church of journalism was founded.

I have doubtless come to a crossroads.

One of the first issues that set me upon it was this oxymoron “advocacy journalism.” In wider vogue than ever, it is a journalism that picks an issue and not only harps on it but takes a side, the excuse being the morality or the patriotism that surrounds it—anyway, the journalist’s own sense of morality and patriotism. And, though I may not favor the idea fully, I feel I’m coming around to it.

At a lecture I once gave, someone from the audience—a plant, I suspect—remarked that I seemed to have ceased being a journalist and now become an advocate. It should be easy enough to pre-select from my writings specimens that could show me aggressively opinionated for something or other; but while such aggressiveness is perfectly acceptable in the form “opinion writing,” I did not dwell on the point—opinion writing, after all, is in itself a full academic course, one that, moreover, chooses a learner of a certain disposition and aptitude. I plainly admitted that I did—indeed with an aggressive predisposition—favor truth, freedom, and justice, and asked my detractor forth with if he himself did not. He may have disappeared from my surroundings since, but not the valid issue that he ignorantly touched on—advocacy journalism.

And I now wonder whether advocacy journalism is not the journalism precisely useful for the sort of society we are, one scandalously unequal, a modern-day feudalism running on political and economic patronage, a perverse operating culture that itself calls for all the aggressive advocacy that can be mounted against it.

As it happens, such an advocacy is restricted in the journalism transplanted from the West as part of a colonial legacy. Ballyhooed as a big weapon for democracy and hereabouts brandished all these postwar years, it has inspired nothing that has led to any significantly democratizing results. Not that anything is wrong with it as set down in Western theory, but it has become so transmogrified in Philippine practice it scarcely resembles the ideal.

At this point, in any case, I’m dealing with all these misgivings mostly in theory. There’s simply so much about the ideal I’m taken with I’m not ready just now to chuck it altogether. I’m probably wishing that some re-theorizing, some reformulating, some re-plotting, as I have said using the analogy of a path taken, could be done to make the practice work for us.

And I’m thinking that, to set our thinking straight, maybe, for starters, we should deal with the self-contradictory sense evoked by the phrase “advocacy journalism.” Perhaps “literary advocacy?”