Saving ethics*
*A talk given to an audience of journalists and public-information practitioners in a forum in Baguio City on 21 November 2012.
First of two parts
WHEN I started as a newspaperman, in the mid-1960s, the profession was not so haunted by ethics as it is now, and that’s because rarely, if at all, did any journalist find himself in a situation where his ethics was tested. “Envelopmental journalism,” the pun on “developmental journalism” that has become the catch phrase for media bribery, lay many years yet in the future. In fact, when ethics entered my vocabulary it was as a purely theoretical word, a word naming a college subject that a freshman was required to take after Logic. Logic was Philosophy 1 (101 in the present-day curricular designation), and Ethics Philosophy 2 (102), the study of the logic of moral behavior. It was something like Good Manners and Right Conduct in grade school, except that it seemed to me at the time to have only the vaguest application in life.
And when finally it cried validly for application I had become cynical, as betrayed by one of my first newspaper columns as a self-styled media critic, in the mid-1990s. The column had been provoked by a suggestion that the Philippine Press Institute (PPI), the national organization of newspapers, print posters of The Journalist’s Code of Ethics for displaying in the most conspicuous spots in the nation’s newsrooms. I thought it naïve to suppose that, by its glaring presence alone, the code would deter malpractice, and so I wrote:
Good journalists don’t need to be reminded of ethics. They learned it in the days of their innocence, along with…the Boy Scout creed, and now hold it in their gut, a part of their system.
Bad journalists, on the other hand, don’t care to be reminded. They are no different from the motel customers who indulge themselves unbothered by the standard bedside bible.
I don’t know exactly how ethics acquired its haunting resonance, but I think it is rooted in contemporary history. In fact, revisiting ethics in that context has made me realize that I wrote presumptuously, flippantly, insensitively, and that I may have even made myself a part of the problem—as a defaulting elder, unable, if not unwilling, to understand, let alone enlighten and inspire reform.
You can imagine how only too eager I have been to make amends. Indeed, I have involved myself with some of the most consistent and aggressive efforts at media reform. For the Philippine Press Institute, for instance, I have been doing for provincial journalists a crash course on ethics, one in which lines are drawn on specific cases. (Indeed, I would like to allot a fair amount of time after this talk to an open forum in which you may raise your own issues. Ethics is one area in which one is scarcely justified to prescribe, let alone impose one’s sense of ethics on anyone else.) I also lecture and write position papers on ethics, among other media issues, for the Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility, a watchdog foundation of which I have been a trustee. Anyway, for the limited purpose that our circumstances allow, I’ll be content being able to provide you, through this talk, with some useful perspective, and this requires, prior to everything else, taking you back to the original sin, as it were.
IT MAY all have begun with martial law. Ferdinand Marcos made himself the supreme court of professional ethics, indeed of just about everything else, and the first business to come under his judgment was the media: he killed it, and substituted it with one of his own creation. The substitute thrived for as long as he kept power, which was long enough—14 years—for some of its members to acquire the combined habits of a lapdog and a hack—they bit and lapped for their masters, that is to say, Marcos, his family, and his cronies. To be fair, others tried to make as honest a living as possible in the circumstances.
Once Marcos had been driven out of power, a sense of righteous vengeance prevailed. Divisions cut across all sectors along moral lines. Those who had served Marcos and didn’t come around in time (apparently the EDSA rising was the cutoff) were ostracized or, on their own, made themselves scarce. But soon enough they were forgiven and admitted into the post-EDSA order. In the media the reunion became consummated particularly quickly, reflecting, in the best sense, a non-judgmental open-mindedness and, in the worst, a fraternal readiness to keep one’s brother, right or wrong.
In the meantime, media proliferated crazily, outgrowing both their market and their supply of professional staffs. As a result, some of them had kept changing ownerships until they found owners who did not care losing money in the business so long as it protected and promoted their interests. Naturally, owners like them also didn’t much care what kind of practitioners they got.
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