As huge as cathedrals
February 21st, 2004
A “Media Summit” last weekend has managed to solicit the grudging admission by the media practitioners in attendance, most of them from print, that the mass media have responsibilities to the public they serve. What’s even more surprising, they actually asked how these responsibilities can be met!
This at least is the impression a reader of the Inquirer editorial yesterday, February 2, is likely to get.
The same editorial also reported the participants’ focus on the whether the media “[have] the power to determine who the country’s next president is (sic)”. From this last concern the same reader can get the additional impression that media practitioners fancy themselves among the planet’s movers and shakers. They wouldn’t have dared ask the question otherwise.
Not coincidentally did the “Summit” take place on the onset of the political season. Many of your favorite pundits have been wringing their hands in distress since December, and loudly wondering how the media can avert a doomsday scenario this May, when a Fernando Poe Jr.-Noli de Castro win seems more than likely.
Indeed, so loudly have some of them sounded the alarm bells that you would think the media were no party to even worse disasters, as they have been a party to every political disaster that has overtaken the country of our sorrows in the last 50 years.
I am not referring only to the rise of celebrity candidates, to the appalling phenomenon in which every Ronnie, Vic and Bong has concluded that governance—whether of a barangay, a municipality, a province, or of an entire nation—is no more complicated than auditioning for a film or TV special role.
Print journalists, in the first place, will say that it’s the movies and television which are responsible. These are the media that enjoy immense, often unthinking following, and the media that have made popularity the most important factor in being elected to public office.
Newspaper reporters, editors and commentators think themselves above their fellows in film and TV because their medium allows them time for the reflection that often eludes broadcasters, and which is rarely expected of film makers. They will deny that they have anything to do with the celebrity rush for public office, and for the public’s equating popularity with competence.
And yet the movies and television have been with us for decades. Only in the last ten years has the involvement of media celebrities been on a scale as large as today. Movie actors have run for office in the past, but in ones or twos. Never have dozens done so, and only since Joseph Estrada ran for senator and won.
If being in movies and TV were by itself the sole reason why the public has turned its adulation for actors and comedians, singers and TV news readers into votes, thus encouraging a veritable horde of media celebrities to run for office, we would have long had actors for presidents and comedians for senators.
No, some other factor has been at work all these years, contributing to the rise of popularity as the ultimate and only requirement for public office. That factor has been at work since 1986, when hopes were highest that the mass media, among other institutions, would assist in the flowering of the democracy that, rumor had it, had been “restored” despite its doubtful existence even before 1972.
That factor is the crisis in information, ironic in the age of the Internet and multi-media interactivity. Theoretically the public should be better informed today rather than the opposite—an assumption premised on the notion that more information is better than less.
It isn’t the amount but the kind of information available that matters, however. Over the last eighteen years since EDSA 1, the amount of information available to the public via the mass media has indeed multiplied, but has not been enough to make up for the deficiency in their relevance.
Of all the mass media, print must assume the greater responsibility for this crisis. Despite their proliferation, the newspapers have not made political discourse in this country any more intelligent or saner since 1986 than it was during the martial law period.
There are exceptions. After 1986 journalists steeled by the martial law period focused attention on the environment, women’s issues, labor, education, governance—the vast panoply of national concerns that had previously been either underreported or not reported at all. We have their work to thank for the growth in middle-class awareness of these and other issues.
Unfortunately, these journalists remain in the minority, among other reasons because the newspapers have been too focused on selling copies to boost their advertising revenues rather than on providing the information free men and women need in a democratizing society.
For the most part, print media have not provided the public the information it needs to understand the complex issues of conflict in, say Mindanao, or the Central Luzon plains. At the same time, such problems as corruption as well as declining professional standards—which the newspapers blame on the schools, but which they themselves perpetrate by the force of their worst practices—have compromised the vital media task of providing the public information on which it can base its opinions and decisions.
In many instances, as a vast number of media studies show, just like their broadcast counterparts, print media practitioners have helped harden mutual suspicion and prejudice, as in the case of the Mindanao conflict; romanticized attempts by military renegades and their patrons to seize power; misrepresented the goals and even methods of social movements; and, during elections, focused on the quirks of personalities rather than on their programs and platforms of government.
The result is public confusion and lack of information. Thus the failure of that most crucial process involved in choosing leaders in a society that would be a democracy: half-way intelligent discourse.
If you suggested this view, no matter how meekly, to your average, Big Broadsheet editor, he will scream in your face, and demand your credentials to justify your right to criticize the media. They themselves, however, make free with criticizing everyone, on the strength of their presumed wisdom and even infallibility. But they will deny citizens—the very ones whose views they shape through inaccurate reports and uninformed comment—the right to express their opinions, whatever the Constitution says.
The media practitioners’ recognition of their responsibilities to the public thus comes pretty late, as does their looking around for ways to meet them. As late as both are, however, there is still hope—if the mass media, particularly print, will focus their attention less on such details as President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s height, Fernando Poe Jr.’s sideburns, or Raul Roco’s sources for the floral shirts he favors, to such questions as what their visions are, if any; how they intend to achieve these visions; and the details of the programs they intend to put in place.
One of the worse things that can happen in the media this political season is to conduct business as usual—which includes the corruption that in every election in this country has seduced armies of reporters, columnists and editors, and which has contributed to the making of a misinformed public than a whole lotful of actors and TV news readers.
In a way more profound than sitting around in a hotel function room arguing the points of media power—and in the process reaffirming their special place in a society they criticize daily, but to whose making they have contributed more than they care to admit—can the mass media make a difference.
They can do that simply by following their own standards and values, among them accuracy, fairness, reliability, and most of all, an authentic concern for this society and its people, instead of demanding public acknowledgment of their supposed greatness. Only accomplishments as real and as meaningful as a truly informed public can justify egos as huge as cathedrals.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, February 3, 2004)