The president and the news media

IN APRIL President Benigno Aquino III addressed the annual general assembly of the Philippine Press Institute (PPI), our organization of newspapers, and ruffled plumes among our proud members as well as among our fellows in the other news media when he took us all to task, which, come to think of it, is precisely what we ourselves do to the likes of him, news subjects, as a matter of course. In general terms, the president told us our practice had become reckless and shoddy–he did bring up some cases but left the culprits unnamed.

His was a valid point, we have to concede, although pride and some sense of privilege appear to have got the better of us. At any rate, our feathers scarcely settled back on our sensitive skins, the president was back on the prickly subject.

At my newspaper’s silver-anniversary party, exactly a week ago, he again took a poke at our profession. It was an even more general poke than he had taken at the PPI affair; for us at BusinessWorld, moreover, it was even softened by some agreeable words–words that, given the specialist type of journalism we do, shouldn’t have been hard to find: a business and economics paper, we have far fewer chances than any news operation of general interest of finding ourselves in the grayer, more emotional media territories–say, crime.

But the president seemed only getting warmed up for more serious business across town that same night. From our party he motored to ABS-CBN. And in a speech on the 25^th anniversary as well of its early-evening news show, TV Patrol, he gave it to them.

He had cases to cite this time and a culprit he didn’t have to name–he only had to refer to him by his trademark call, “Magandang gabi, Bayan!” and he was as good as named. He accused him of egregious bias, of pooh-poohing government accomplishments and insisting on irrelevant, if not imagined, shortcomings–in other words, instead of aspiring to the proper journalistic virtue of fact-based and reasoned skepticism, creating clouds of mere puff.

Actually, even before the president ran into him, he had been a national problem: no less the consenting vice-president in the scandal-plagued regime of Gloria Arroyo, in fact her czar for housing, a badly infested service, as it is now being revealed in the effort to hold them to account.

Noli de Castro was thus certified baleful baggage on his own. Why all the same, all this time ABS-CBN has kept him could only have to do with the ratings: a mass market likes him–which is also why his Pavarotti style of broadcasting is widely copied.

That’s right, at ABS-CBN, he has been all along a kept man. He was not rehired as a news anchor after his tenure; he has never left ABS-CBN. Even as vice-president, he did a Saturday morning show on its Teleradyo. With one foot in government and the other in the private media, he was your quintessential straddler–indeed, your conflict of interest personified.

De Castro and his keepers have been mum, meanwhile, obviously at a loss for any credible, self-redeeming reply. Among clubby media people and dubious promoters of propriety, however, some pathetic quibbling goes on to the effect that the president proved rather wanting in social graces–a rude guest. It only betrays a mistaken appreciation of two things: first, of who was in fact favored by whose presence, and, second, of what the relationship between the president and the media is about.

As surfeiting as it may seem, truth in the public interest is what that relationship is about, and it can best be served, on the president’s part, with openness and candor and, on the media’s, with dogged but unbiased inquiry.

Doubtless the president has done his part.

The foregoing is a slightly revised version of a piece in today’s BusinessWorld, the newspaper of which the writer himself is the publisher.