Harbinger of Bigger Troubles?

By Hector Bryant L. Macale and Venus L. Elumbre

On April 5, the New York Times came out with an editorial criticizing President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for having “completely lost touch with the ideals that inspired the ‘people power’ movement.”

The editorial, which was quickly played up by the Manila press and was coincidentally published on the president’s birthday, said that Arroyo was “reviving bad memories of crony corruption, presidential vote-rigging and intimidation of critical journalists.” It warned, “democracy itself may be in danger.”

The editorial concluded with a call to US President George W. Bush to tell his Asian ally that “by undermining a hard-won democracy, (Arroyo) is making her country more vulnerable to terrorist pressures.”

If the editorial was lapped up by the local press and sent jitters all the way to Malacañang, who could be blamed? Back in the last few years—the dying years—of the Marcos regime, it was the foreign media, with its increa-singly critical view of the presi-dency, that seemed to signal the beginning of the ruler’s loss of favor with the US administration.

And now, with the Arroyo government facing incurable disenchantment among Filipinos, the last thing it needs is a similarly negative judgment from a foreign newspaper. Filipi-no columnists who read the New York Times editorial wondered aloud if the editorial reflected the Bush administration’s displea-sure over Arroyo’s “increasingly authoritarian tendencies.”  Arroyo critics began clucking their tongues, saying the end may well be in sight for the administration that has succeeded in hanging tough despite all odds.

So what did it really mean?

Overreaction
Some journalists covering the Philippines for foreign media organizations thought that the government may have overreacted to the editorial. Karl Wilson, Manila bureau chief of the wire agency Agence France-Presse, told PJR Reports, “The New York Times editorial was just an editorial. It was the opinion of the newspaper and that is the right of every newspaper in a democracy.”

Wilson, who has covered in Europe, Asia, and Africa for more than 30 years and has been based in the country for two years now, is president of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP). FOCAP, which was organized in 1975 during the days of the Marcos dictatorship, is composed of 200 correspondents covering the Philippines. FOCAP repre-sents more than 70 foreign news organizations and international wire agencies.

The press, Wilson pointed out, “can dish out praise or it can criticize. How you react to that criticism is up to you.”

Abby Tan, who has covered the Philippines during Marcos’s rule and continues to do so as a stringer for the US-based publica-tion the Christian Science Monitor, said the influence of the foreign press in shaping international perception is “overrated.” Although foreign governments, including the United States, had used the foreign press in pressuring then President Marcos to quit, she also pointed out that the foreign press was able to play a big role in the 1986 Edsa uprising only because the local press was muzzled and only the foreign press could report the Filipinos’ sentiments.

Lin Neumann, who used to cover the Philippines for UCAN but now teaches journalism at the University of Hong Kong, shares a similar view.

“What the New York Times says in its editorial has little or nothing to do with what’s decided on in Washington,” he said. Describing the daily’s editorial board as independent, he added that the paper is not “speaking on behalf of Washington.”

Neumann told PJR Reports that although there is a quick reaction every time a notable US paper says something about the Philippine administration be-cause of worries that it might affect the close ties between the two countries, it is a mistake to think that the American press is expressing the views of Washington on the Philippines.

“That is usually not the case,” he explained.

The foreign press indeed played a role in Marcos’s ouster but only “because the local press was not as free,” Neumann added. The foreign correspondents were here then not to topple Marcos “but to just cover, to simply write stories.”

News as it is
According to Neumann, the role of the foreign press today will be much different than it was before.

“I think that whatever people will write about the Philippines by the foreign press now is of little consequence to what happens here,” he explained, adding that it was the local press that revealed exposés against the Estrada and Arroyo adminis-trations and not the foreign press.

To these journalists, covering the Philippines—including its presidents—is just like reporting on any news story.

According to Wilson, cove-ring Arroyo is just like covering anybody else. “If the president says something that will be of interest to a wider audience, we will cover it,” he said.

Tan shared a similar view. If a certain event might have impact or is of interest to foreigners, she said, that would most likely be reported by the international media.

Whether one is covering the Philippines or anywhere else, it is still the same, Neumann explained. “I don’t think that the values are particularly different one way or the other,” he said.

According to him, “almost always, the critical stories that I’ve written about the Philippines are based on what I’m told by Filipinos.”

For FOCAP executive director Claro Cortes, a Filipino journalist who used to cover for the wire agency Associated Press, the government would be afraid of any critical comment whether it came from the local or foreign media. “It’s just that foreign comments are magnified,” he said.

Cortes said he had always tried to look at events from a reader’s point of view. “I don’t put a racial perspective into it; not even my being a Filipino affects my journalistic decisions.”

Neumann said his reports only reflected the views of the political commentators or the people themselves. “You don’t need foreigners to make it up. The people will tell you.”

The views, he said, are “better left to the voices in the Philip-pines to work that out. It’s quite complex enough without someone trying to impose their own views on that.”

With research from Janice C. Ponce de Leon and Junette B. Galagala

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