Awards without meaning
July 1st, 2003
Filipinos love to hand out awards, and like beauty contests (every town fiesta has one), cultural, political, social and professional awards are as perennial as grass in this country of our sorrows.
Except for those meant to sell products or services—which are driven by commercialism—the awards are usually well-intentioned. They mean to encourage “excellence” by recognizing it. At the core of the awards is also the conviction that there are many good things in this country to celebrate, and that not everything in it is cause for the usual disgust and teeth-gnashing.
The problem is in the meaning of “excellence,” which in many cases is undefined, and presumed to mean the same thing for everyone. That in turn leads to either nebulous criteria, or even their absence. The result is grumbling, controversy and even protest, as has happened in the designation of National Artists this year. The designation, among other perks, provides a monthly allowance and rewards the designee with a State funeral, and constitutes State recognition of achievement in the arts.
If pressed, I am sure the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Cultural Center of the Philippines can defend their choices. But questions have been raised about the current harvest of National Artists. It doesn’t necessarily mean these choices are flawed, and while at least one of their choices has raised eyebrows including mine, I am in no position to make any informed judgment from this vantage point.
I suspect, however, that the protests and complaints over the choice of National Artists this year—in the past universally accepted and respected—is partly due to the skepticism provoked by other awards.
I am specifically thinking of the awards for the mass media offered by various groups, many of which continue year by year, but which, perhaps unbeknownst to their sponsors, are regarded as gestures without meaning, and are not credible even to the community they supposedly honor.
Many of these awards are in the first place given without any commitment to the necessity to include as many practitioners as possible. They are content with sending out press releases urging editors to nominate members of their own staff and sometimes themselves. This immediately limits the field only to those who care to take the time to send off letters of nomination and copies of their articles, and excludes those editors and practitioners who correctly regard it as unworthy of professionals to have to seek recognition.
One such award in the mass media this year is thus almost universally regarded in the more serious circles of the journalism community as meaningless. A few of its choices can be defended, but even those choices were compromised by the singular lack of a credible process (which perhaps explains why one of those awarded did not attend the ceremonies).
A judge in the awards relates her misgivings. Tasked to name a journalist from either broadcasting or print for the lead award, the judges did not even bother to look at the video and audio tapes the radio and TV stations that answered the call for self-nominations sent.
In another category, one of the judges, a former politician, simply suggested the name of a columnist (already previously awarded by the same organization) and of a media organization he liked. When pressed exactly for what achievement and when, he said for the media organization’s role in the Estrada impeachment trial—which was in 2000!—and for the columnist’s “consistency.”
No specific article or group of articles written during a specific time period was cited. Instead the process boiled down to “iconic” choices—meaning who happens to be popular among certain circles at a given time, or, as push came to shove, whom the judges liked, whether personally, politically, ideologically, or all of the above.
Not that these awards were unique. There is one in whose winning circle no journalist in print or broadcast who has ever disagreed with, challenged or otherwise earned the displeasure of the Catholic Church will ever find himself or herself, no matter how courageous, competent, or even brilliant the journalist is.
This is a gross disservice to Philippine journalism, in which there are many practitioners who labor with dedication, persistence and courage in a calling where the risks are great and the rewards small. (Why those who know nothing about journalism, and whose idea of rewarding practitioners is to canonize those who share their own views, persist in being judges in such awards is one of the Great Mysteries of the Ages.)
One suspects that the scramble of almost every organization known to man to award journalists and other mass media practitioners is driven by no other motive than to reward those who have been “good” as goodness is defined by the award givers, and to punish those who have been “bad”— good and bad being defined not in terms of skill and competence but as compliance with dominant views, meaning those of the sponsors and the judges.
In this sorry landscape there is one exception. (In the interests of transparency I must inform the reader that I have been involved either as judge, coordinator, or member of the screening committee in the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for about eight years of its 14, and that I edit the Philippine Journalism Review and Journalism Asia, publications of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, the organization that administers the award.)
Given this year on June 26, the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards (named after the late finance secretary of President Corazon Aquino) has striven for all the years it has been in existence to define as clearly as possible the criteria of the awards, and to refine the processes of its selection of the journalists it will recognize. These are in my view the two components most critical to assuring the integrity of any awards, especially those in the problematic calling of journalism.
Except for the winners from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism—which, as its executive director Sheila Coronel says, does only one thing and might as well be good at it—there were no winners this year that could be described as iconic (see “Today reporter bags 1st prize in JVO awards,” p. 1., Today, June 27, 2003). This alone suggests how carefully the winners were chosen.
Starting with criteria that have been defined, redefined, and fine-tuned for 14 years, the awards process begins with an independent scan conducted by senior journalism students from the University of the Philippines of all the magazines and newspapers in Manila. Hundreds of articles are generated in the process, which are added to the dozens nominated by provincial press editors. After the scan, a committee of media practitioners and academics screens the articles to eliminate those less than 1,000 words in length, and which are either hard news stories rather than investigative or explanatory reports (what these terms mean has been carefully defined, but has nevertheless invited debate).
The prescreened articles are then turned over to boards of judges (there are six, or three in each category of investigative and explanatory reporting) that are composed of media practitioners, academics, and specialists in governance and politics, environmental and social issues, and business and economics. Finally, two “super boards” of judges are convened to decide on the finalists and the first, second and third prizes in each category.
This means that there are three levels involved in the determination of the finalists and winners. It’s not a perfect system, but something most journalists apparently can live with, since no one has ever protested the results of the JVO Awards.
While the JVO prizes are substantial (P70,000 for the first prize winners in each category plus a plaque and a study tour in Canada or Australia), the real prize in any award is what it does to help improve Philippine journalism. By recognizing this year as in the past genuine achievement in journalism, the JVO Awards help raise standards, and along the way sharpen the criteria for judgment that need to be developed and enforced to make awards meaningful.
In this the JVO Awards are the exact opposite of awards without any clear criteria and credible processes of selection. Philippine journalism would considerably be better off without the latter. They confuse both journalists and public as to what constitutes authentic excellence; they produce results contrary to their claimed intentions.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, June 27, 2003)