Bearers of Good Tidings – Website seeks to balance ‘bad’ news in media

Website seeks to balance ‘bad’ news in media
Bearers of Good Tidings
By Venus L. Elumbre

Everyday, Filipinos are fed with news that are mostly about crime, war, corruption, and violence.

It is the stuff that ordinary Pinoys have for breakfast and late dinner as they tune in to the morning news or the late news.

With such stories dominating the newspapers and TV news every single day, has the reading and viewing public lost its appetite for the “bad news”?

In a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey late last year, it was found that the public somehow had grown tired of too many negative stories in media. Conducted at the height of the impeachment proceedings against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (Aug. 26 to Sept. 5, 2005), the survey showed that nearly half (41 percent) of Filipinos believed that the country’s media “have become purely negative and are no longer helping the country.” From Metro Manila, where most media outfits are based, 47 percent thought that media had become too negative.

Malacañang cited the SWS survey findings to justify its claim that the press had been focusing too much on the bad news. So much so that Arroyo appealed to media to shed off its “bad boy image” in a Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas conference in November last year.

Now for the good news
Now here comes a news website that seeks to provide a breath of fresh air, especially to those who are losing hope and confidence with the way things are going in the country.

Conceptualized in late 2005 and launched early this year, Good News Pilipinas is “an informational website that will make every Filipino feel proud and (prove that) we have achieved a lot as a people, and continue to be successful in various ways here and abroad,” according to its managing editor Rico Hizon. A Singapore-based Filipino broadcast journalist, Hizon thought of putting up a website that would evoke a sense of optimism among Filipinos.

“I think a good-news website about the Philippines should have been done many years ago. But it has been overlooked and now maybe is the right time,” says Hizon.

Having lived and worked overseas for eleven years, Hizon observed that the perception about the Philippines abroad has always been uneven. “There are more negatives than positives,” he says. Hizon, who is the business and financial news anchor of the BBC World News, hopes that with the use of the website as a medium, good news about the Philippines would reach audiences across the country and abroad.

“Yes, there is bad news, but there are also a lot of good things happening in our country. So that is what we highlight in Good News Pilipinas (GNP),” Hizon adds.

GNP claims to be nonpartisan and that it has no agenda. “All we want is just to tell the whole world that the Philippines is a big, beautiful country and that the Filipino is hospitable, talented, smart, and resourceful,” according to the GNP website.

“The advocacy we all share in this website is simple. Love for country. Pride in being Filipino. Spreading the good news about the Philippines and the individual and group triumphs of Filipinos in general,” Hizon says.

GNP presents stories on achievements and breakthroughs by Filipinos in the country and abroad. Like newspapers and other news websites, GNP has news on national events (“The Good Balita”), business and economy (“Biz Progress”), sports (“Sporting Gold”), tourism (“Beauty of the Philippines”), arts and culture (“Arts and Culture Achievements”), entertainment (“Showbiz Success”), and infor-mation technology (“Technology Milestones”). Judging from its content, what apparently makes the website different from mainstream media is that it gives much emphasis to Filipino success stories (“We are Pinoys!”). The website also provides space for opinions (“Inspirational Views”), which are authored by Filipinos who tell their experiences in other countries.

Seek and ye shall find
Isn’t it hard to look for good news given all the things that are happening?

“No, it’s not at all difficult to find good news about our country. Good and positive things happen everyday, it isn’t just highlighted,” Hizon says.

INQ7.net writer William Esposo has the same sentiment. He claims there is no shortage of good news—it is in the treatment of news where media has its shortcomings.

“Media reporting must identify the positive aspects in what is seemingly bad news. The public deserves to be informed of what good opportunities there are behind bad news,” according to Esposo (“The message crafters,” Nov. 2004).

Though not an exclusively “good news” website, INQ7.net has devoted a special site for positive news since Nov. 2004. Dubbed “The Good News on INQ7.net” , the site is a collection of good news articles published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The site looks like a blog in which articles are arranged not thematically but chronologically so that the most recent articles appear at the top.

“Our objective in news selection is simple. No politics! No politics! No politics!” Hizon emphasizes. Besides not giving space to stories involving politics and governance, GNP also does not get news sources from the government.

The stories are largely contributed by journalists who “believe in the good news” and are not aligned with any political or interest group: lifestyle, art, and culture journalists Susan de Guzman and Giselle Kasilag, Margie Logarta of the Hong Kong-based Business Traveller Asia, and food columnist Claude Tayag.

Also, GNP accepts contribu-tions from Filipinos here and overseas who have their own positive stories to tell.

While GNP focuses only on the good news, there is an effort to ensure that the stories are fair and balanced. The people behind GNP do so by simply sticking to the “good news facts,” according to Hizon. He adds that the website does not offer analysis of the news so as to avoid putting any spin to the news.

Whose business is it?
But the emergence of “good news” media is not necessarily good news to some.

In his July 22, 2003 column, Inquirer’s Conrado de Quiros argued that good news and bad news are relative concepts. What is good for one may be bad for another, and vice-versa.

“It is simply not true that ‘good news’ is naturally positive, constructive and good for the nation and ‘bad news’ is naturally negative, destructive and bad for the nation,” he explained. De Quiros also said that enhancing the country’s image “is the business of PR and the tourism department” and not of journalists.

Vergel Santos had a somewhat similar view, saying that media should not define for the public which news is good and which is bad. “News is supposed to be neither good nor bad, but neutral,” he pointed out in his August 2002 commentary in the Philippine Journalism Review (now called the PJR Reports).

As far as Hizon is concerned, the comments that GNP has received so far inspire them into “pursuing the good news advocacy.” The website has elicited positive feedback from Filipinos and even non-Filipinos all over the world, which shows that there are Filipinos out there who are hungry for good news. It is a hunger that GNP intends to satisfy.

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