Summer’s discontent
May 13th, 2003
An elephant runs down Metro Manila’s busiest thoroughfare and People Power venue, EDSA. A town mayor refuses to allow the burial of the ashes of a SARS victim, perhaps in the belief that the virus survived the fires of cremation.
Men crazed by hunger attack strangers with knives and die in the usual hail of police bullets. A journalist dies in an ambush, and another is unceremoniously wounded in the rear, both events taking place in broad daylight and within spitting distance of a police station, while two others are hauled off to jail on libel charges.
A Moro Islamic Liberation Front force attacks a town in Mindanao. Its spokesman denies it over radio despite the sound of gunfire in the background, but later admits that the attack was a tactical blunder.
The Church urges the faithful not to panic in fear of SARS, but a government doctor suggests that panic and paranoia might be helpful—as in suspecting everyone you meet of carrying the virus. Meanwhile, a congressman says with a straight face that a sneeze presumably laden with SARS viruses could be, under the provisions of an antiterrorism bill still being debated, a terrorist weapon, the use of which could land the offender on death row.
Welcome to summertime Philippines, a surreal season that in times past has also witnessed women giving birth to fish; a gay man claiming to be pregnant, and the international news agency Reuters believing him; saintly apparitions alighting on telephone poles.
Philippine summers, like summers everywhere, are times for taking the family to the beach or to the mountains, which usually means Baguio City. But they’re also seasons of madness, combining the merry-making of town fiestas with orgies of violence in city and countryside.
Still unfettered by the rains, the various armed groups, the criminal syndicates—and, yes, the Philippine police and military—take advantage of unclouded skies to even scores, rob banks and kidnap people for ransom, or to murder with impunity. By summer’s end and as the rainy season sets in, the number of deaths from the conflicts that rack this country from Sulu to Isabela subsides, though the conflicts remain, only momentarily cooled by the rains.
The Philippines has had any number of summers that were seasons for the bizarre, as well as of political uncertainty as 1986 and 2001 were. But the summer of 2003 is likely to go down in the records as the season of SARS, as well as open season on journalists.
The fear of SARS is spreading faster than the virus itself can, with drug stores reporting a run on the sale of vitamins and even the hardware sections of the malls reporting shortages of industrial safety masks. On jeepneys and buses people look suspiciously at anyone who coughs or sneezes, which is usually a signal for them to whip out handkerchiefs if not face masks, which only a very few Filipinos seem inclined to wear in public.
The panic’s there as well in people shunning their newly returned OFW neighbors, SARS transforming them overnight from local icons who can always be relied on for a small loan into pariah carriers of a terrible disease that seems to have taken the firmest foothold in those Asian countries with the strongest economies, and where overseas Filipino workers have been deployed in large numbers.
The fear of an assassin’s bullet has for some reason not taken hold among Filipino community journalists except possibly in Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur, where the most number of Filipino journalists have been killed since 1986. Neither has the fear of a libel suit, which has lately become the main recourse of local government officials in retaliating against journalists they don’t like.
Although “only” one community journalist this year has so far been murdered—that’s John Belen Villanueva of Legazpi City, who was shot to death last April 28—while another survived an ambush in the killing fields of Davao the next day, April 29, two others were jailed in Cagayan de Oro City on May 7 upon the filing of libel charges by a town mayor who didn’t like their reporting.
The libel suits, however, were only the latest in a string of libel suits against other journalists; for example, against a radio broadcaster who’s facing 50 libel suits filed by Cagayan de Oro City and police officials.
The libel suits, the National Union of Journalists’ Davao City Chapter coordinator Carlos Conde says, are meant to do the same thing as assassinations: “instill fear in the hearts of journalists so that they won’t be able to perform their duty to report and criticize official actions.”
The charges against the two journalists, concludes Conde, are forms of “harassment and repression” against the media. Conde says that “the public, the consumers of news from print and broadcast, [is] the final arbiter of the media’s or a journalist’s fate. The [public] alone [has] the right and the responsibility to ‘discipline’ the press, not by filing criminal charges, not by assassination.”
But judging from their reaction, which has mostly been indifference, and a virtual shrugging of their collective shoulders, most Filipinos don’t particularly like journalists—and who can blame them?
In Manila and in the communities, the radio broadcasters rant and rave daily without the inconvenience of the facts, and among columnists many attack anyone at will in behalf of this or that interest, usually a political one, or (as in one Manila broadsheet) use their columns to help their secret PR clients sell more cars.
The “journalists” the public tends to be familiar with are the people they hear over radio daily and who use the power of the media to advance the narrowest of interests, including and most especially their own. On the other hand, the few (less than 10 percent of the population) who read the newspapers are likely to equate journalism with sensationalism, a daily emphasis on sex and violence, inaccurate, biased reporting, and opinions based on suppositions, rumor, and the interests of whoever else’s payroll some columnists are in.
Many people in the media do forget—or have never understood—that what they put in print or say over the airwaves can have an impact on the lives of very real people: for example, on the family of a woman wrongfully identified as a suicide by the media and who was therefore refused burial in the Catholic cemetery of her hometown. Or on the safety of a community activist a broadcaster accuses, with no proof except his own belief, of links with NPA guerrillas.
But as Conde says, criminal suits (libel is a criminal offense in the Philippines), and most certainly assassinations, are not the approaches of choice in compelling journalists to do better at their jobs. But the problem is that those who can best compel journalists to be accurate, fair, balanced and honest—the publics of the media—aren’t too interested in doing so, despite their reliance on the media for much of their information and for practically all of their entertainment.
Right now the public that could make the Philippine media better than any libel suit is focused on the usual (and in their minds more urgent) Filipino discontents, which in the bright sunlight of every summer become concerns of titanic proportions—the high cost of living lives that have become increasingly desperate, for example—plus one, namely SARS, and how to cope with the fact that one’s OFW relative could be bringing with her not only cash from Hong Kong but viruses as well.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, May 10, 2003)