Prickly points of practice

HERE, AGAIN, are discussions of points raised with me now and then by students of journalism as well as practitioners and outsiders who have to deal with them—news subjects and sources chiefly. Merely essential, not to mention unilateral, these discussions can surely use much further carrying on. Anyway, for their general purpose, they are here offered:

Confidentiality

If a news source says anything in public that differs from, let alone contradicts, something he or she has told a journalist off the record, the agreement of confidentiality becomes invalidated automatically; the journalist may thus proceed to reveal it, if only to alert the public to the discrepancy.

One particularly memorable case involved Jarius Bondoc, a columnist of The Philippine Star, and Romulo Neri, the chief of the National Economic Development Council in the presidency of Gloria Arroyo. Bondoc published what Neri had told him in confidence after Neri had given testimony at variance with it in a congressional inquiry into a suspicious deal involving Arroyo and him.

Some colleagues felt Bondoc had compromised the profession itself, causing it, not just him, to lose some trustworthiness, a feeling that, I thought, betrayed a disproportionate appreciation of both deed and profession.

Corruption

Many seem to think that a law exists covering all cases of bribery or that lawmaking can deal with bribery decisively. Surely not where bribery is conducted as a wholly “private arrangement”—where bribe-giver and bribe-taker are private individuals and where the deal does not work—in any case, not too obviously—against the public interest.

Indeed, the law very scarcely works at all even where it should. Simply, reality works against theory. Bribery, private or official, is a widely operating sub-culture, the main culture being one of patronage; in that sense it would be more the exception than the norm for anyone to bother with bribery.

So, what to do? Some high-profile examples of sanctioning—not just making the law stick but establishing propriety and ethics as part of a professional, and eventually institutional, regime of a clean and open practice—should surely help. Lifestyle checking that ends in some form of sanction, even if by simply public exposure, has proved effective. A truly testy prerequisite has to be met, however, and that is breaking the old boys’ clubs that professions and institutions themselves, the media included, seem to have become.

Editorial privilege/judgment

Analogized in the context of a proposed law that requires the news media to publish or broadcast the reply of anyone who felt wronged by them (right of reply), editorial privilege/judgment turns on the democratic principle of press freedom, as does the privilege speech on the principle of parliamentary immunity.

At any rate, while the press has had no problem conceding to congressmen their privilege, they have always been reluctant to return the favor. Indeed, they are now trying not only to erode press freedom but, with a right-of-reply law, to take some of it for themselves.

The thing to do is to set up their own news media, as some of them have in fact done: it is legal, it is not so twisted, although it still stinks.

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Vergel O. Santos will take a holiday from this site until the second week of January 2013.