Member, Board of Advisers,
Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility

(This is a talk Prof. Teodoro delivered at the Press Freedom and Philippine Law Roundtable discussion sponsored by CMFR on December 5, 2006. The book Limited Protection: Press Freedom and Philippine Law, which Prof. Teodoro edited and in which he has an essay called “Understanding the Culture of Impunity” was launched.)

Dismantling the culture of impunity is not really as Quixotic as it sounds. Many of the steps needed to achieve that goal some media advocacy and journalists’ groups like the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility and the National Union of Journalists have already taken, the killing of journalists and consequent problems having validated to some extent these groups’ efforts– among them engaging the law community and addressing the professional and ethical issues that afflict Philippine journalism– in enhancing the responsible exercise of press freedom.

FOR MANY media advocacy and journalists’ groups worldwide, the “culture of impunity” explains why journalists are surveilled, threatened, beaten, jailed, tortured, and killed, in some cases despite laws protective of press freedom.

Defined primarily as the way some societies ignore, permit or even encourage various forms of violence against journalists as well as their harassment and intimidation, and allow these to go unpunished, the culture of impunity has become a common phenomenon in many countries in the post 9/11 era. As has been widely observed, for example by the international free expression watchdog group International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX), among the consequences of the events of September 11, 2001 was the reversal of an earlier trend, as the world moved into the 21st century, towards the liberalization of free expression.

The “culture of impunity” is today almost exclusively used to explain the continuing assassination of journalists in the Philippines. It is based on a paradox: its dominion is rooted in the weakness of the Philippine justice system. This weakness is the product of the synergy of a number of political, economic, and social factors. A crucial aspect of this weakness is the ineffective witness protection program which inhibits witnesses from coming forward, despite repeated police urging.

Most evident is the feeble will on the part of the political authority to protect citizens including journalists. But in the communities journalists claim to serve, the apathy of much of the citizenry is as plain. It is an apathy so pronounced it validates suspicions that the press’ own flaws have led to widespread skepticism over its claim that it is an invaluable public asset

Meanwhile, while there are many lawyers committed enough to free expression to offer their services to the families of slain journalists– which in the communities is no mean act of courage. But there do not seem to be enough press freedom advocates among lawyers to match the sheer number of journalist murders. In some communities this is a critical factor quite simply because, unable to rely on the justice system’s operating as a matter of course even in murder cases, the families of the slain need private prosecutors to see to it that their kin’s killers are brought to court.

While the synergy of these factors is what drives the culture of impunity, the key reason for the continuing killing of journalists is still the near-zero arrest, trial, and conviction of their killers.

In a report (“Elusive Justice”) for the Committee to Protect Journalists after a visit to Pagadian, Zamboanga del Sur shortly after the murder of Edgar Damalerio in 2003, former CPJ Asian Bureau head Lin Neumann pointed out that “in another place, [the] crime might be relatively easy to solve. The victim was well known locally, and two witnesses were eager to come forward and talk to police. Plus, the shooting occurred across the street from the local police station.

“But Pagadian City isn’t your typical town,” Neuman went on. “A dusty
trading port surrounded on one side by verdant hills dotted with coconut
plantations and on the other by a gentle coastline interspersed with
fishing villages, Pagadian City has the slapdash feel of a poor town where
a very few people make quick money. While coconuts and rice may be the
staple crops, smuggling and corruption, say the locals, are the real
source of wealth for a small percentage of the population.

“Despite the town’s remote location, Damalerio’s murder drew condemnation within the country and abroad, and authorities in Manila, a world away from Pagadian City, say they are also trying to move the case along. In the Philippines, however, justice can be elusive. In the countryside, far from the capital, warlord politics, official corruption, and a breakdown in the justice system have contributed to the fact that 39 journalists have been murdered since democracy was restored in 1986-and all those cases remain officially unsolved.”
As is widely known in the Philippines, among the signs of the weakness-or the breakdown, as Neuman put it– of the justice system in the Philippines, whether in the countryside or its urban areas, is the police’s protecting suspected killers, or even their involvement in the killings which some local officials have been accused of masterminding.. This lethal combination results in a climate of fear to which even Department of Justice prosecutors are not immune.
It should be obvious, however, that this weakness is among the many consequences that result from a political system of patronage and corruption that rule the communities where most of the journalists have been killed. The existence of local centers of power with interests- among them corruption and/or such criminal activities as illegal gambling- in conflict with those of the public and which therefore have to be concealed; and, if they are not intimidated into passive acquiescence to wrong-doing, the consequent collusion of the police, prosecutors and even judges with these political and criminal interests.

Many of the murders of journalists have thus been traced to their reporting or commenting on official corruption, gambling, prostitution, smuggling, and other community issues. The very system they criticize, however, is what makes the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of their killers difficult and at times nearly impossible.

Most of the slain journalists cannot be accused of not doing journalism’s essential task of reporting and commenting on community concerns especially governmental performance. But one suspects that the apathy over the killings evident in many localities cannot be attributed to fear alone. That apathy is at least partly the result of perceptions that most journalists are, shall we say, less than perfect. Anyone who has had the good fortune of interacting with some journalists in some form or another-perhaps as a trainer in many of the continuing education programs in place in this country, for example, or as a practitioner, or both, or as a victim, or subject, rather, of their tender attentions — knows only too well the many professional and ethical problems that afflict the practice.

Too many journalists get involved in the quarrels of the strong, abandoning the non-partisanship essential to the journalistic enterprise in favor of, say, writing and distributing press releases for their patrons or using their radio programs to attack their patrons’ rivals. Their coming to harm once they’re perceived as partisan is only one of the consequences of ethical and professional failure, but not its worst outcome. That distinction certainly belongs to the resultant perception in many communities– developed over time and in the course of experience—that many journalists are not only partisan and corrupt; they don’t have much to say that’s of value to anyone else except themselves and their patrons either. Radio commentary is thus regarded as so much background noise that’s good for an occasional chuckle or so, but hardly worth thinking seriously about. As for print, some of its practitioners are not only so obviously in this or that interest’s payroll they might as well shout it to the rooftops. Other than predictable paeans to the wisdom of this or that politician, they don’t have much to say either.

These perceptions affect even those who’re trying their best to do their jobs as fairly, as honestly and as rigorously as possible. But because the most numerous are the noisiest and the most visible, the entire press community including its best practitioners suffers, most concretely in terms of public indifference to the murder of even its best and brightest.

The implications for the media advocacy and journalism communities are obvious. But I will nevertheless enumerate what I think are some of the measures needed to-possibly, hopefully and eventually–dismantle the culture of impunity.

1. Media advocacy and journalists’ organizations need to deepen and accelerate the continuing education of journalists, especially of the untrained or inadequately trained. But it is also necessary to engage journalism schools and the Commission on Higher Education to assist the effort to improve the professional and ethical training of future practitioners at the tertiary level. The same groups including journalism and communication schools must add media literacy planks to their training programs to educate the public on the essential role of the press in society as well as on the need for the public to monitor press performance and to demand observance of the press’ own values.

I am not saying that killers will hesitate to kill ethical and professional journalists precisely because they’re ethical and professional, but that the citizenry is likely to protect professionals who are assets to their communities, and, if they are murdered, to vigorously protest it and pressure government agencies to punish their killers.

2. As the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility has been doing, other media advocacy and journalists’ groups need to engage the law community on at least two levels: initiating changes in the law curriculum towards the encouragement of free expression advocacy as suggested by Dean Pangalangan, and to work with the same community in the reform of those laws that affect the exercise of free expression, such as the libel law, the decriminalization of which is decades overdue.

3. Equally important, the press needs to even more rigorously monitor and hold the powerful to account, to give voice to the voiceless, to be fair, humane and just, and to defend its constitutionally protected freedom both through conscious advocacy as well as responsible practice.

If the journalism community’s experience with the murders that have haunted it since 1986 has a lesson to teach, it is no less than this basic imperative. Journalists need to do their jobs as professionally and as ethically as possible, and to engage the entire community in making sure the conditions for it exist. That I think is still the very bottom line.

If all roads once led to Rome, today all roads lead to the homeland of another empire–into the very belly of the beast itself.

Social Weather Stations tells us that more than a fifth of the population–20 percent, or some 16 million souls– want to leave the country in response to the brutal realities of economic need, in the desire to assure themselves a future staying in the country of their birth cannot give, or in a quest for order the chaos and violence of Philippine society cannot provide.

Some 8 million so far have preceded them. Unless what they want to escape from abates, many more will follow. And what they want to escape from is the crisis that, while seemingly never so urgent as today, has in varying intensity been a fact of life in the Philippines for over 400 years.

I was a child of the sixth decade of the 20th century and you, children of the 21st. But despite the years that separate us we are all children of crisis as we are all children of these 7,000 islands.

When I began teaching in this University as an instructor many years ago, the streets of our cities rang with cries of Down With Imperialism, Bureaucrat Capitalism and Fuedalism. Though rooted in the specific realities of the Philippines, those cries echoed a global awakening and movement for the dismantling of those machineries of oppression that kept millions of men and women poor and denied them control over their own lives–and the construction in their place of societies in which no one need go hungry or sleep under bridges.

Thirty-five years later the world has indeed changed, but primarily in the strength of the illusion that it has been for the better.

Twenty percent of the world’s population consumes 80 percent of its resources, over which still only six percent–the handful of multinationals that more than governments now make the decisions that shape the world– have control.

Some 800 million people go to bed hungry daily. Gas, water cannon and truncheons greet protesters in Bogota and Genoa as they do in Manila. Thanks to the madmen of empire, the 21st century is likely to be, as the 20th was, another century of war.

The leaders of the Empire have already turned international law upside down and inside out, not only by attacking and invading a sovereign country in 2003, and by bombing the former Yugoslavia from an industrialized state back to third world status, but also by threatening to do the same to others, even as they continue to control weaker, more pliant countries through blackmail, threats and bullying.

Here, in the client state that a hundred years ago imperialism built over the ruins of the first Republican revolution in Asia, forty eight percent of all households consider themselves poor, as the legions of the unemployed swell in the cities and peasant families that must hire out their labor for a pittance starve in the countryside.

Ruled by an irresponsible, corrupt and incompetent political class that owes allegiance only to their own greed and the empire, Filipinos protest at the peril of their lives. As their incomes shrink, and the effort to keep body and soul together becomes a minute-by-minute imperative, they are made to pay more taxes likely to go into bank accounts under fictitious names like Jose Pidal or Jose Velarde, or at best into kickback- built projects with swollen budgets out of which 30 percent or more goes into the pockets of civilian and military bureaucrats who keep fleets of cars, and maintain houses in Manila, Baguio, and Tagaytay, and even condominiums in New York on P30,000- a -month salaries.

To the despair this breeds, this country’s rulers respond with repression: with threats, harassment, arbitrary arrests, bombings, massacres and assassinations, and only lately, with a national ID system which so shames even its instigator it had to be clandestinely signed, and which will be imposed, at immense profit to the contractor, in violation of the very laws and mandated processes we are told we all should obey.

The absolute wonder of it all is not that all these are happening, but that this immense obscenity persists without the kind of protest that the global and national regimes of oppression, poverty, mass misery, destruction and death demand. Do we not all suffer the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune inevitable in an unjust order? Do we not also bleed like those killed killed in Taguig, Tarlac and Mindoro? And are we not diminished by the murderous global regime that keeps millions unclothed, unfed and unsheltered and condemns them to short brutal lives so homeland moms can drive the kids to soccer practice in their Expeditions? Surely there must be some reason other than blackmail, the threat and actual use of force, or muscle and gunboat diplomacy that has made so many either indifferent to what is going on, or unable to comprehend it.

Let me venture a suggestion why, despite the injustice, violence and misery the global and national orders breed there is less defiance than the reality demands. The media–the disciplines to which you have devoted four years or more of your lives to study and master–have failed to report, much less interpret, the world to its inhabitants.

The media could hardly have done otherwise. In the Philippines the media are firmly in the hands of interests whose political and business agendas are often contrary to the imperative of truth-telling. You have all heard it said that the broadcast media are driven by commercial interests, that it is what will rate rather than public significance that decides which stories will make it to the six o’clock news. The broadcast media are indeed redefining news to mean reports that assure higher ratings and advertising revenues.

As a consequence, broadcast news is turning into entertainment, and into orgies of voyeurism and bloodlust as it focuses more and more on celebrities in addition to the usual emphasis on blood and gore. Since 96 percent of Filipinos have access to television, and since as a consequence television is the most credible medium for some 72 percent of the population, much of the information Filipinos receive is either in the category of fluff stories on the state of this or that actor’s romantic life, the violence of life among the poor, or uncontextualized reports on the latest guerilla-Armed Forces encounter in Mindanao, which leave viewers with exactly the impression the state wants people to have: that rather than responses to poverty and injustice rebellions are their causes.

Reporting in print is only a little less driven by the same commercial aims. The one newspaper in which what appears on the front and opinion-editorial pages is subject to the owner’s approval every day seems to be an exception. And it may also be true that this newspaper’s difference from your favorite broadsheet is evident in their respective attitudes towards government. But it is equally true that they have one thing in common: neither questions the validity of the political, social and economic systems.

The defects of these systems are too obvious to be concealed through editorials celebrating Christmas and Valentine’s Day and the anniversaries of this or that association. These systems’ survival in fact depends on their capacity to reform themselves, which is the cause to which the second broadsheet is dedicated. But in practice, the consequence is a refusal, or inability, to look into the root causes of this country’s problems, and to see them merely as the results of mistaken policies and bureaucratic bungling.

The natural aversion to the effort that providing context entails is reinforced by the logistical demands of keeping expenses down and reporters busy. A 2000 study by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility thus found that only 26 articles–and these included columns and editorials–out of over 6,000 generated in five broadsheets during the March-July period that year provided some kind of backgrounding on the ongoing Mindanao conflict.

Globally the illusion is that audiences have become empowered through their supposed capacity to choose from among media old and new as well as among programs. But it is still only a handful of corporations–seven as of last count, down from nine a decade ago–that control practically all of the entertainment and news that blankets the planet daily, whether via print, tapes, discs, or broadcasting. They provide choices and alternatives indeed–but only from among options they decide and they determine. As a cable subscriber, for example, my choices are limited to the movie and news channels, all of which offer a uniform view of events, without an Al-Jazeera among them. Choosing between CNN and Fox isn’t much of a choice, and is much like choosing between the Cartoon Network and the Disney Channel.

But the global media corporations, like our own homegrown ones, also claim to provide only what people want–after decades of developing those wants through trivial reporting, a focus on actors, rock stars, and kings, queens and princes in the guise of human interest; a refusal to provide readers and viewers the background information the best practice of journalism demands; and steadfast celebration of the virtues of capitalism and the inherent right of the militarily superior country to bomb and threaten those countries that don’t agree with it; to prevent social change of any kind that’s contrary to its economic interests; and to generally to do what it pleases regardless of international law.

A study by the Fairness and Accountability In Reporting media advocacy group of TV news reporting thus found that over 90 percent of those interviewed over US television networks, prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, were government officials or belonged to pro-war groups.

The New York Times, in a rare instance of self-criticism, admitted last year that it had not been as rigorous in its reporting as it should have been, and thus ended up supporting the mythical case for the invasion of Iraq because it supposedly possessed those weapons of mass destruction that have never been found. By the time the New York Times had criticized itself–without, however, apologizing to the people of Iraq–a hundred thousand civilians were dead and an entire country including its cultural heritage was in ruins.

Only mostly Internet sites have provided alternative views on such issues as globalization and war. But even in the new media right-wing sites bankrolled by the corporations have proliferated, thus threatening to overwhelm the alternative sites that have tried and are trying to balance the skewed reporting in favor of empire and war dominant in the global news organizations.

Beyond those obvious instances in which a global audience is mesmerized and misled by trivia, distorted and biased reporting and outright disinformation–which those in journalism know as the manufacture of false information to influence opinion along predetermined lines–there is as well the daily assault on the senses of those who have access to television and print: the unremitting pounding into millions of heads of the idea that capitalism and its harvest of misery under the aegis of world empire is the best that mankind can ever hope for. After all, is this not, as postmodernism coyly claims, the end of history as it is the end of everything else except capitalism? Therefore, if you happen to have the misfortune to be born poor in a poor country and not rich in a rich one, the only thing you can do is to move to a richer one, where, among other options, you too can labor as a domestic or scrub bedpans for dollars, yens or euros.

What is the journalist, the filmmaker or anyone else involved in the media and communication professions to do given the disorder that reigns both at home and in the world? I suggest that it is exactly what he or she has been trained to do, and that is to report on the world and to interpret it. That is the media practitioner’s first duty, just as his or her first loyalty is to the facts. The media practitioner true to these first principles through the exercise of those skills in research, documentation, analysis, and writing and expression paradoxically becomes more than just a skilled technician. Falsehood, distortion and bias are after all the foes of the moneybags and militarists whose unholy partnership with each other as well as with local tyrants has shaped both Philippine society and the world.

At the same time, and even more critically, the practitioner needs to restore integrity to the language by being as precise and as exact in its use as journalism demands. He or she must oppose the debasement of language that now reigns in western media : that debasement which has made “militant,” and “liberal” and “leftist” and “radical” into terms of resentment, and which distort the meanings of “fundamentalist” and “terrorist” to apply solely to the enemies of empire though they apply with even greater force on the empire itself and its client states.

Media practitioners need to re-affirm in practice the basics of truth-telling, humaneness, justice and freedom that are at the very core of journalism regardless of medium, and to rescue language from the misuse to which it has been subjected in furtherance of the greed for wealth and power.

Only rigorous commitment to the truth-telling that is journalism’s first and last responsibility, and as a consequence, to reporting and interpretation beyond the conventional, can make better media. For media practitioners, researchers and scholars, the struggle for a just society through better media is of course first of all here, in this country’s newspapers, radio and television, and in the Internet. But there is also room in that struggle for the involvement of those who, for whatever reason, choose to live elsewhere, or have to.

The globalization of resistance is one of the answers to the globalization of oppression and exploitation. The Internet, for one, now provides not only the opportunity to remain connected to the country of one’s birth, but also to interpret events in it to global and Filipino audiences. By doing so through whatever medium or whatever means, you would still be part of the epic effort of the Filipino people, now in its 135th year since 1872, to find their place in the world as free men and women.

Both the global order and the Philippine one need to be understood by the people in their millions who can collectively transform societies. By interpreting the world media practitioners can also help change it. You now have the power to do so, and I hope that you will use it.

This launch is occurring nine days before the visit of US President George W. Bush to the Philippines, and on the same date when informal peace negotiations between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front have resumed in Oslo, Norway.

Although Bush will be in the Philippines for only eight hours, his visit could be more than an occasion to renew the Arroyo government’s unqualified support for the US’ so-called war on terrorism, and for Bush to announce other rewards for the Philippine government’s cheering on US international outlawry, its willingness since March this year to help fig-leaf US unilateralism via the “Coalition of the Willing,” and what’s even more crucial, its support for the US goal of total global dominance in this century in the form of US basing rights and US troops on Philippine soil. Although banned by the Constitution, administration plans to amend the Constitution are ongoing, and if realized, will very likely include deleting these provisions.

The visit can also result in a bilateral trade agreement between the US and Arroyo governments, bilateral agreements being one of the main US tactic in getting around the decisions of international organizations such as the UN.

We saw this tactic at work recently in the signing of the bilateral agreement between the Bush and Arroyo governments exempting US nationals from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, which was established to try genocide and other crimes against humanity. Although not to have signed it would have meant the Philippines’ being denied US aid, we all know that the Philippine government did not have to be forced to do so, but did so willingly.

We might yet see the same tactic at work, if not now, perhaps as part of the Bush visit fallout in the next few months, in the form of a US-RP trade agreement that would nullify the poor countries’ collective decision to reject the outrageous impositions of the wealthy in Cancun.

The Bush visit, however, will have an even more immediate impact in that it is taking place only a few weeks into the advent of the political season, which informally began October 4 last week when Mrs. Arroyo changed her mind about not running in 2004. It may even be that Mrs. Arroyo was convinced to run by her current US patron, who seems to have a proclivity rare among US presidents in his not being overly concerned with giving the impression that he’s committed to a particular candidate.

Past US Presidents have seemed uninterested on who the President of this unfortunate country will be, while, to hedge their bets, US operatives here spread their support more or less evenly among the possible winners. Subtlety not being one of his qualities, Bush has several times expressed his support for Mrs. Arroyo in both word and deed. Included among the latter are the Philippines’ being designated a major non-NATO ally, and the royal welcome Mrs. Arroyo received when she visited the United States early this year.

However, Bush’s visit itself is already sending to the elite contenders for the Presidency, to the entire political class, and to the economic masters of this country, the very same message of support for Mrs. Arroyo. But he could also say in words on October 18 what he has so far said mostly in deeds.

The peace talks, on the other hand, are being resumed, though informally, also during the beginning of the political season, when the question of how committed to peace rather than war the Arroyo government is will likely be raised by various groups. More critically, however, the talks are being resumed despite Jose Ma. Sison’s and the New People’s Army’s being listed as terrorists in the US and the European Union–a listing which Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople has admitted is politically-motivated because it is meant to “force the NDF to the bargaining table”.

As important as these two events are, what qualify this launch as an auspicious occasion are the books themselves, which are not coincidentally being launched together, their subjects being all too intimately related.

Neither terrorism nor being labeled terrorists is a new experience for the Filipino people. Although the Spanish colonial period was not without terrorism, it took the United States invasion at the turn of the century to bring the use of terror against the civilian population to new heights in the form of the massacre of entire villages, and the use of torture, assassinations, exile and long prison terms against the Filipino resistance to US colonization. Of course the resistance to US occupation was labeled an insurgency, and its members brigands and bandits–or, in more contemporary terms, “terrorists.”

Initially to secure US power over this country in furtherance of the military goals that were the means to secure sources of raw materials and markets in this country as well as the rest of Asia for US industries, and later to maintain its control over the economy, the use of terror–which may be defined as the indiscriminate use of violence in furtherance of political aims–is one of the lasting legacies of US rule in this country. Today its various forms–forced evacuations, massacres, torture, murder and disappearances courtesy of the police and the military–are part of the machinery of state repression to preserve the existing political and economic system.

US involvement in state terrorism has also been widely documented, from CIA operatives’ planning and helping execute terrorist attacks on peasant communities during the Huk rebellion, to the training of the military and the police in the arts of torture and “crowd control” from the martial law period to the present. Add to those the prospects of US troop involvement in local conflicts–in a country where experience with foreign troops has been catastrophic to human rights, the family, the communities, and the environment.

But what does anyone expect from an unjust order? The use of terror in this country has been in furtherance of preserving the political and economic system in which minority privilege reigns at the expense of the many. This is a link about which the vast, suffering majority of Filipinos are increasingly becoming aware, and knowledge of which has convinced many of them to declare their freedom from the bonds of necessity, and to take control of their destiny.

The books being launched today are among the indispensable means through which knowledge and understanding of that link can spread even further among our people. It is to the publication of such books that Aklat ng Bayan is committed, in furtherance of the great enterprise of remaking Philippine society.

I will not take up any more of your time, having used up my five minutes this evening already. Once again, our warmest welcome to all, and our thanks for your taking the time from your busy schedules to be here today.

Welcome remarks at the book launching of Jose Ma. Sison’s US Terrorism and War in the Philippines and ofJuliet de Lima’s Politika and Ekonomya ng Pilipinas, October 9, 2003, 5 P.M., Balay Kalinaw, UP Diliman)

Philippine police have arrested an aide of deposed former president Joseph Estrada as the government vowed to pursue the political backers of a failed military mutiny and limit the damage to the country’s image and economy.

After extensive negotiations, some 300 rebel troops agreed to abandon the building in the Makati financial district they had wired with explosives and have since returned to their barracks to face justice.

Meanwhile, Ramon Cardenas, a cabinet minister during Estrada’s presidency, was arrested in a raid on his home.

The authorities said the role of opposition Senator Gregorio Honasan in the mutiny was also being investigated.

As for the mutineers’ claims of corruption in the military brass, the Philippine government has said it would investigate this .

Augustine Anthuvan spoke to political commentator Luis Teodoro from the University of Philippines and first asked him about the reasons for the mutiny.

�Well it should be seen in the context of the fact that there is a lot of dissatisfaction not only in the military but in many sectors of Philippine society. In the case of this particular group of young officers, they have a lot of dissatisfaction with the way for example the government is waging the war in Mindanao, as well as dissatisfaction, criticism or outrage over the perception of corruption in the upper echelons of the Philippine military. Some of them also seem to be genuinely convinced that certain, well specifically Secretary Angelo Reyes, he is involved in continuing attempts to demonize the Muslims through involvement, according to these officers, in the bombings in Mindanao. So on the one hand, they�re tapping into real sources of discontent both among the people in general as well as among the younger members of the officers core�.

These young officers have made some serious allegations. They�ve said as you have pointed out that senior members in the Arroyo administration in the cabinet have been actually supporting the MILF, selling military ordinance to the MILF and the Abu Sayyaf terror group. Now they wouldn�t have gone that far to make such allegations if they didn�t have the proof, would they?

�Well they based their allegations on their personal experiences according to them. And they also based their allegations about the ammunition on the fact that they have discovered ammunition sourced from the Department of National Defence among the guerillas of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. I don�t know how true that is, whether that�s really as systematic as they make it sound. I�m referring to the sale of ammunition and weapons to the MILF. I don�t know if that�s happening at the higher levels of the military, probably at the local level. But the more serious allegation I think is the charge that Secretary Reyes orchestrated the bombing in Davao, in order to make peace talks difficult if not impossible�.

You�re referring to the wharf bombing in Davao city in April this year right? So is the Philippine cabinet, President Arroyo in particular, going to take up these accusations seriously and launch a full investigation?

�Well Secretary Reyes himself has asked for the establishment of a high level commission to look into these allegations, according to him, so that he can clear himself. The thing however is that the suspicions of this nature have been afloat in the Philippines in the media for example and among non governmental organisations for many months. So the fact that these junior officers have brought it out into the open, has a positive aspect to it in the sense that ok, now maybe they can really seriously look into it. Now Secretary Reyes has recommended that President Arroyo create such a commission, a commission to investigate him. So far I think President Arroyo has not said anything about whether she will follow Secretary Reyes’ suggestion�.

Luis Teodoro, Professor of Journalism at the University of Philippines speaking with Augustine Anthuvan.

But even before IMC was established, Dean Malay had been teaching the U.P. journalism courses then lodged in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. I was an English major with what was then known as a “concentration” in creative writing and journalism (a strange, probably dangerous, even incompatible, combination). I was among his students in two subjects, newswriting and feature writing.

Professor Malay would come to class in a bow tie and dress shirt, and from there proceed to the Manila Times, then the most widely circulated newspaper in the country, where he was a columnist and was also one of the editors–and where, we his students presumed, a bow tie and dress shirt were the norm.

We made secret fun of his bow ties, of which he seemed to have dozens; his choice of the cigarettes he perpetually smoked, a local brand from the Ilocos and not from Richmond; his pacing up and down before the class rather than sitting down; his looking out the window or at the ceiling rather than at his students while lecturing on the complexities of writing a news lead; and his voice, which was loud, insistent and demanded undivided attention.

Some of us derided his current events quiz, which was everyday and took 20 minutes of each class period. We wanted professors to carry on about “the larger issues,” rather than force us to read newspapers. But no one said he didn’t know his stuff as a journalist. When he told us about the debates in the newsroom over the proper use of this word or that phrase, we listened. Was it “watch out for” or “watch for” the publication of Nick Joaquin’s latest book? Was the name NVM Gonzalez spelled with two “z”s or with one? Was it ever correct to say “peoples” or “sport”?

We listened, too, to his accounts of his experiences as a reporter before and after World War II, one of them his covering the suicide of a Tondo fisherman who had swallowed a blasting cap, and whose remains, he assured us, had to be literally scraped off the walls. Occasionally, he would put his students down, especially those who ignored his admonition to put things simply and clearly, and to think of the readers rather than themselves. Being then under the influence of Lionel Trilling’s murky prose, I once used the word “pestilential” in a feature story. He reacted to it by saying, while looking at the ceiling as usual, that “class, this is one word you should avoid like the plague”–a little joke we caught on to only after he had laughed at it himself.

But he emphasized ethical behavior most of all, admonishing his students to never, never accept anything from any politician, businessman or whomever else one was interviewing or otherwise writing about. That rule was for him absolute and brooked no ifs and buts, and meant refusing not only envelopes and all-expense-paid trips, but even a cup of coffee.

Time does wonders to one’s outlook. I never got over the bow ties. But I did come to realize that a journalist needs to be informed and that it’s a constant and daily need not easily realized in a world of conflicting claims and versions of events. As a teacher at U.P., I give current events quizzes myself, although not daily, and now understand the virtues of looking at the ceiling or out the window if there are windows, rather than being distracted by that student writing a note to his seatmate, or that other one smiling up at you while her mind’s elsewhere.

The newsroom debates he recounted–those debates over the proper use of this word or that phrase–are lessons in the permanent responsibility of communication for exactitude and precision, and the need for journalists to write for the reader and not for each other, a common vice in Philippine journalism. It recognized the fundamental duty of journalism to report events, and to report them as clearly and as precisely as possible.

His instruction to refuse even a cup of coffee, which many describe as far too demanding, and as raising the ethical bar too high, on the other hand, draws early a line the journalist must not cross. Many journalists do draw a firm line between reporting with no consideration other than the facts on the one hand, and on the other, writing with one eye on who benefits or suffers. But some draw the line too late–so late in fact that many find themselves no longer journalists but paid performers, surprising even themselves at how quickly they have been transformed into dancers to the tune of the powerful.

Dean Malay preferred to draw the line early. That way there would be no mistaking where the boundaries between the ethical and unethical are, an issue that in the murky world of Philippine journalism is especially critical.

Dean Malay did not limit the lessons he taught to those he imparted only in the classrooms of U.P.. Though already dean of Student Affairs at U.P. Diliman, in the martial-law period he was arrested several times for what he wrote, and thus demonstrated how valuable a free press was, and how it had to be fought for despite the threat of prison and worse. This was itself an invaluable contribution to the broad resistance against dictatorship. But to that dangerous course he also added involvement in the organizations of former political prisoners as well as of the relatives of the disappeared, and regular attendance in antidictatorship demonstrations.

But he was more than a human rights and antidictatorship activist. He was also committed to a radical vision of a better society and nation, the coming of which he sought through his actions to realize, but which he seemed to know he would not see in his lifetime.

Dean Malay thus combined in his person the virtues of authentic journalism, and of active involvement in the fight for human rights and for an alternative future.

In 2001 Metrobank joined other groups in recognizing his achievements both as a journalism practitioner as well as an outstanding leader in journalism, the latter achieved both by his teaching as well as by the force of his example as practitioner.

The process of his selection was among the most rigorous I have ever seen in the often confused and confusing world of journalism awards. As the process unfolded, and the boards of judges that made up the awards committees came to know more about Dean Malay as teacher and journalist, it became evident that the twin recognitions were properly his.

The months-long search for nominations among journalists, academics and media advocacy organizations had yielded several names, but that of Dean Malay was the one most often mentioned. Once nominated, however, the nominees were subjected to the further probing of a referee, who interviewed the nominee’s colleagues, other practitioners, academics, his friends and enemies and others familiar with him or her. In many cases the muck-raking produced surprising results.

In the outstanding journalist awards, of which there were three, but especially in the lone leadership in journalism award, there was soon no contest. There was not a single negative comment about Dean Malay, no claims that he misused his writing for personal ends, no suggestion that he was other than professional in the four decades that he practiced. There was instead universal recognition of the critical role he had played in the development of the skills and ethical awareness of the practitioners consulted, and testimonies to his personal and professional integrity.

What this indicated was that no one else except Dean Malay then combined in one person the integrity, the experience and the influence on the profession and on professionals that defined leadership in journalism in addition to outstanding practice in it. That could well be his epitaph as journalist and teacher. But it is also a reminder to us all that what we do during our all too brief journey on this earth decides what we will leave behind.

(Today, abs-cbnNEWS.com, May 20, 2003. Also delivered on May 18, 2003 during the tribute to Dean Malay held at the Parish of the Holy Sacrifice in UP Diliman.)

Along the way, during the dark ages of the Marcos terror, I also saw, and heard about, crimes so unspeakable one is hard put to call the perpetrators human. Though with the foreknowledge of failure, I will try to maintain some kind of academic, meaning neutral, tone in this piece, despite my belief that martial law was too important a period to leave to academics to discuss. That period needs to be understood by the millions of people in this country to whom it is either an abstract construct and something far removed from their concerns–or, if at all they know something about it, regard it as an aberration, an abnormality in a system that is otherwise sane and reasonable.

My own view is that martial law and its architects were the logical children of the political, economic and social system. They included not only Ferdinand Marcos but also the “Rolex 12″–the generals and civilian officials Marcos took into his confidence in planning and implementing this vast conspiracy against the Filipino people–as well as the murderers and torturers he let loose upon this land so that he might continue to rule it.

Since the system that gave them birth has remained basically unchanged, it has not only bred, but is even now still breeding the same creatures from the black lagoon of corruption, national betrayal and injustice that is at its core. Yet not all of these creatures repose in its dark depths still, many have resurfaced and now actually walk among us in various guises.

Remembrance is indeed the only antidote to the return of authoritarian rule. But what once made it possible–and, from the standpoint of Marcos and company, necessary–is still with us and makes it reprise, though not necessarily in the same form, a constant peril.

It is from within that framework that I will now address the task at hand, which is, What happened to media during the martial law period, and what that has meant to media and this country.

When Ferdinand Marcos placed the entire country under martial law in September 21, 1972, among the immediate targets of the military for arrest were journalists and other media practitioners who shared one characteristics. All had been critical of the Marcos government, to some extent or the other, although two gossip columnists (Amelita Reysio-Cruz and George Sison) who were similarly thrown into Camp Crame had also committed the unpardonable offense of making fun it.

Included in the Armed Forces of the Philippines “National List Of Target Personalities” were reporters, editors and columnists from the Manila Times (e.g., Rosalinda Galang), the Daily Mirorr (Amando Doronia), the Philippines Herald (Bobby Ordonez), the Manila Chronicle (Ernesto Granada), the Philippine News Service (Manuel Almario) the Evening News (e.g., Luis Beltran) and Taliba (Rolanda Fadul), at that time the only broadsheet in Filipino. Juan Mercado of the Press Foundation of Asia was also arrested.

Writers from Graphic magazine (Luis R. Mauricio), Asia-Philippines Leader (Ninotchka Rosca), and the Philippines Free Press (Napoleon Rama) were also imprisoned at the Camp Crame Detention Center. Broadcasters from radio and television (Jose Mari Velez and Roger Arrienda) completed the list. With the arrests, all media organizations were also shut down. In the morning of September 23 people awoke without a newspaper on their doorsteps and with only the hiss of empty air over their radios.

The arrest of journalists still occurs with alarming frequency today, though, so far, only in other countries. In those countries journalists have been so targeted for such “reasons” as insulting heads of state, an offense we call libel in the Philippines, as well as other , even more basic reasons most people would have no problem second-guessing.

Media practice after all involves the exercise of power: the power to arm other men and women with information on matters that bear on their lives, enabling them to form opinions about them, and to take action in the furtherance of those views.

Journalists, because they deal in information, can help populations make sense of what’s happening, and no matter how indirectly, can be instrumental in mass decision-making. Journalists are potential lead actors in the democratization process, social change, and even revolutions.

While it is not journalists who usually overthrow governments, they can arm the consciousness of those who do–the citizens who, having understood their society’s as well as their own state from various sources of information including, and, in many cases today, primarily the mass media, storm prisons and palaces.

To justify the arrest of media practitioners and the padlocking of media, Marcos characterized Philippine media as licentious and abusive, and worse, involved in what he labeled the “Leftist-Rightist conspiracy to overthrow the government.” (Presidential Proclamation 1081) This was merely another way of saying, however, that the information some media practitioners were disseminating was not favorable to the Marcos government.

But the licentiousness of the Philippine press before September 21, 1972 was evident in many cases familiar to contemporary observers. It was evident in the sensationalized treatment of news, in the liberties that were often taken with the facts in order to angle stories to sell more copies, in the emphasis on sex and violence of which not only the tabloids were guilty.

But the licentiousness, much like today, tended to conceal the fact that there was at the same time honest, in-depth reporting, informed editorials and columns, and plain good writing. The source of these parallel development was an entire generation of journalists and writers who had come of age during the intellectual and political ferment of the mid-60s that occurred during the rapid growth of the radical student movement. In the 40s and 50s conservative to the point of reaction, the Philippine press in the 60s accepted into the profession–unknowingly, I am certain–young journalists whose outlooks were reformist, even revolutionary.

Veterans of the campus and national struggles of that period, these young practitioners helped politicize some of their older colleagues, among whom, in any case, there were remnants of 1950s radicalism. This reformist-revolutionary wing of the press produced the reports, the opinion pieces and the writing that echoed the demands on the streets and in the countryside for fundamental change, and the condemnation of “imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.”

Who or what did this phrase refer to? Ferdinand Marcos was first of all the arch-bureaucrat capitalist striving to enrich himself and his own through the office to which the Filipino people had regrettably elected him twice. He was–necessarily, some would say–also the protector of the feudal tenancy system (“the worst of the planet,” according to Roy Prosterman), while at the same time serving as chair of the local executive committee–the Philippine government–of what is now politely referred to as US hegemonism.

It was therefore not only on the streets, where democracy was being given substance by the tens of thousands people who expressed their demands for fundamental change through the demonstrations that from 1970 to 1972 were taking place daily all over the country, that Marcos was being attacked. Marcos and the entire system he headed were also under threat from the newspaper. They were also under siege in the arts and in the literature that had flowered in the bosom of the vast people’s movements of the 60s and early 70s.

But the threat was neither one of physical annihilation nor of being overthrown-at least not yet. The threat was that of being exposed. Slowly but surely unmasked, Marcos and his cohorts could no longer rule in the old way–that is, under democratic pretenses, with the trappings of liberal democracy including press freedom.

One of Ferdinand Marcos’ first acts as strongman was therefore to shut down newspapers and other media and to create a censorship system to ensure that the press–at least that part of it that he allowed to resume publication–would support rather than challenge his regime. This system was part of a package of intimidation which included Marcos-amended anti-subversion, rebellion and sedition laws and even a rumor-mongering decree.

Just how correct the regime was in regulating the press, instituting a system of censorship and seeing to it that only reporting and opinion-writing favorable to it appeared in the press may be gleaned from what happened both during the 14 years of the martial law period as well as afte.

My own remembrance is that during that period writing, whether journalism or literature, ceased to be fun and became a chore best set aside for better times-or perhaps reserved for the underground press. (After my release from General Fidel Ramos’ detention center, I had to submit everything I wrote, including several pieces for the Philippine Heritage Encyclopedia then about to be published in Autralia, to a sergeant at the Civil Relations Service office of the Armed Forces of the Philippines at Camp Aguinaldo, who stamped each page “approved.” That was guaranteed to take the fun out of something one not only really loved to do, but also respected both as a craft and as a commitment.)

A number of other journalists and writers arrived at the same conclusion, some vowing, as my 23-year senior but compadre Nick Joaquin, a.k.a. Quijano de Manila, did never to write until the regime had passed into a state of remembrance past contempt. Others went back to law practice, as Manuel Almario and Luis Mauricio did, or left the country altogether, as Eddie Monteclaro and Amando Doronila for sometime did. Some chose to write for the underground press, among them the National Democratic Front’s Liberation, as did Antonio Zumel, and, until their arrest and torture, Satur Ocampo, Carolina S. Malay, and Jose F. Lacaba.

This meant that the practice of above-ground journalism was left mostly in the hands of those who where either uncritical of the regime, or supportive of it. This removed from the profession some of its most respected and capable practitioners, making the profession so much the lesser for it. This had an impact as well on the younger journalists who no longer had the benefit of learning from the experience of their older colleagues through the informal newsroom apprenticeship system?for decades the process through which the younger generation learned from the older.

At the same time the arrest of the stubbornly critical–for example Jose Burgos of We Forum and Malaya and Antonio Ma. Nieva of the Bulletin–continued, to drive home the point that the regime would brook no criticism. Later the arrests became “invitations” extended to critical journalists for them to face panels of interrogators, which happened to Melinda de Jesus and several other women journalists.

The consequence of government regulation and terrorism was the denial of information, specially information vital to their well-being, to the Filipino people. This was achieved not only through the removal from practice or the regulation of the writing of critical journalists. It was also achieved through the celebration of “positive articles”–i.e., articles that demonstrated the supposed vitality and validity of media-government “partnership” and media’s adherence to the “purposive” tenets of “developmental communication.”

Aside from giving developmental communication a bad name, this situation made the government press release–emanating from the Ministry of Information with its 200 million-peso budget–and the statements of civilian officials and the military the major sources of news about government. With only a few exceptions this reliance on government issuance killed enterprise and most certainly investigative journalism, and encouraged the plodding mediocrity that the death of journalistic enterprise inevitably develops.

Thus did the spectacular growth of the country’s international debt from less than a billion dollars when Marcos was reelected in 1969 to 30 billion dollars by the time he was overthrown in 1986 remain a secret to most Filipinos until they could no longer do anything about it. The design and other problems, including its exorbitant cost to them, of the Bataan Nuclear Plant remained unknown to most Filipinos until EDSA. The gross violations of human rights–the torture, the bombing of entire villages, the massacres, the summary executions, the rapes, the hamletting of communities suspected of harboring guerillas–continued without the knowledge, even today, of millions of Filipinos.

And thus has the entire martial law period remained unknown and unappreciated not only by a new generation, but even by millions of people who, while living through it, have never quite understood it.

Skepticism of the government-approved crony press over its glowing reports on the economy, government and society in general could not but develop among the middle class. There was after all the reality to compare with what was being reported in the crony press. This led to, among others, the growth credibility of foreign information sources–including Penthouse and Cosmopolitan, and even Time magazine, which in 1969 had published a cover story on how Marcos was going to save Filipinos from themselves. (Penthouse had a section called “Asshole of the Month,” with an appropriate drawing of a horse’s backside. It awarded Ferdinand Marcos this distinction in one of its issues. Cosmopolitan had a story on the world’s wealthiest women, and–in tribute–put Mrs. Marcos in the same company as Queen Elizabeth and Elizabeth Taylor in terms of net worth.)

This credibility was evident in the way copies of these publications’ articles were clandestinely circulated, giving rise to what became known as Xerox journalism. Certainly this was at the deserved expense of the crony newspapers, one of which, the day after Ninoy Aquino’s funeral in 1983, published a front page story about a man struck by lightning during a thunderstorm that day, and only a small photograph of the funeral cortege on page 10. But the reinforcement of trust in foreign publications–if it comes from a foreign publication it must be true–the agendas of which do not necessarily coincide with Filipino interests, certainly amounted to uncritical acceptance of their reports.

The martial law experience thus demonstrated several truths about media and the circumstances that make them either instruments of liberation or of oppression.

Second, martial law left a legacy of secrecy that up to now, 27 years later, is still very much in government, as evidenced by the press’ still limited access to information which government sources claim to be classified (Some University of the Philippines Journalism 101 students, for example, are still told by desk sergeants that the police blotter is “classified”. So are data on homeless Filipinos, as a student doing an investigative report on the matter found). This has made the investigative report, in a country where so much still remains hidden from the public, the most important journalistic form in our time.

Third, the police and the military having learned that the law has no meaning beyond their willingness to enforce it, violence and lawlessness have become the norm rather than the exception in much of Philippine society–perpetrated mostly by “peace officers” and military men themselves. Against recalcitrant media, violence as a legacy of martial law remains a state option that requires no formal declaration of authoritarian rule to use–and that is why Inquirer publisher Isagani Yambot goes around with a bodyguard nowadays.

Fourth, corruption in media flourishes as another legacy of the martial law period, during which government officials raised the levels of corruption to unprecedented heights, offering journalists the though choice between accepting bags of money as a reward for writing favorable stories, or writing unfavorable ones and finding themselves in prison and in the tender mercies of the torturers of ISAFP (the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines) and C-2 (Constabulary intelligence).

Yet these legacies are mostly unremarked upon, perhaps because there is no culture of continuity in Philippine society through which the lessons learned by previous generations is transmitted to the next. Despite efforts such as this conference, every generation has had to start from zero all over again, past generations including my own having failed to reproduce their experience for the benefit of those who will come after them.

It has often been said that there has been no serious effort at an accounting on the part of the governments that succeeded the Marcos dictatorship. No Truth Commission has been created, no special courts to look into the monumental crimes committed during the Marcos reign of terror. Part of the reason is the lack of any sustained public clamor for an accounting. But there is also the involvement of certain personalities of the political elite such as Fidel Ramos and Joseph Estrada–among dozens of others–in the Marcos government.

I fear that one of the enduring legacies of martial law is its own repeatability. Authoritarian rule, including the undeclared kind, can happen again because too many Filipinos still don’t know what happened from 1972 to 1986, let alone why it happened. About the martial law period they have nothing to remember, and they wont know it when they see it.

(Delivered at the “Memory, Truth-telling and the Pursuit of Justice: A Conference on the Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship” held 20-22 September 1999 at the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City.)

Various human enterprises share with journalism the role of attempting to explain a complex, problematic and perplexing world. In this attempt journalism’s special function is to provide information, and beyond that–but as a consequence of that function–to help men and women interpret what’s happening around them so they can make decisions about important issues, and when necessary, act on them.

Journalism is thus ideally a liberating and empowering undertaking, just as science and literature can be. But like science and literature, it too can be enslaving. It can liberate human consciousness by providing information that is significant, accurate and complete, but it can also help harden what 200 years ago the poet William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles” through information that’s trivial, inaccurate, misleading, or even false, and which helps create a consciousness captive to ignorance.

In the Philippines journalism has been, since La Solidaridad, an arena of contention between the forces of liberation and change and the forces of captivity and stagnation. For over a hundred years this confrontation has continued in Philippine journalism, taking various forms as the 300-year-old crisis of Philippine society is played out like an endless drama, and each assuming dominance as the crisis wanes or intensifies.

It is important to keep in mind Philippine journalism’s two traditions, each of which has gone by different names in the last 100 years. There is the tradition of acquiescence, which basically supports whatever is in place–whether governments no matter how abusive and brutal, or Philippine society in its various stages of illusory change, and however unjust. This is the tradition, embodied in the colonial press, that supported Spanish rule and opposed reform and independence over a hundred years ago. On the other hand is the tradition of protest, which in the late 19th century demanded reform initially, and then progressed into a demand for independence and social change, among them the restructuring of land ownership.

The latter tradition is what went by the name “alternative press” during the latter part of the Marcos period. It was presumed to be a new phenomenon, but wasn’t. What it was was that part of the press that during the most acute periods of the Philippine crisis has resurfaced to provide Filipinos the information they need to understand events that the tradition of acquiescence is either too timid or too involved with to be able to adequately interpret, or even to want to report. The Marcos period was an important watershed in the resurgence of this tradition.

The Marcos dictatorship came to an end fourteen years ago, amid hopes that the lessons of the authoritarian experience would lead not only to the restoration of democratic governance, but also to the making of a just and reasonably prosperous society.

Among the lessons of the period was that a free press could be a means of mass empowerment. That empowerment would be achieved among other means through the information that a free people need so they can make decisions about their governance and the issues that affect their lives. Marcos himself implied through his acts that the press was crucial to that process.

One of his first acts when he declared martial rule on September 21, 1972 was to arrest critical media practitioners and to shut down all mass media, particularly the newspapers and magazines that had been exposing the corruption and brutality of his government. In explaining this away as necessary, he claimed that media were part of the “leftist-rightist” conspiracy–i.e., the growing mass movement that was threatening not only his rule but the entire economic and political system.

That such publications as Marcos targeted could exist in the 60s and 70s was the result of worsening antagonisms within the ruling elite. But that such practitioners could be in those publications was the result of the politicization that the Philippine mass movement had set into motion in the mid-sixties, first among students, writers and artists, and then later among professionals, workers, Church people, and poor farmers.

Though a part of the press–thanks to inter-elite antagonisms and to politicized practitioners–was indeed critical when martial rule was declared, it was within reach of government, was therefore vulnerable, and was easily suppressed. Part of the vulnerability lay in the nature of press ownership, which at that time as now, was in the hands of groups and individuals with economic and political interests to protect and advance. Thus the regime eventually allowed the publication of certain newspapers-but only those owned by Marcos associates. It also allowed the resumption of broadcasting by similarly controlled TV and radio stations. But what followed was nearly fourteen years in which, with all mass media under government control, the regime decided which information should reach the people and which to withhold.

However, despite repression in the form of imprisonment, torture and even extra-judicial execution, an alternative information system slowly developed during the period. The building of this system was initiated by the mass movement that had been driven underground. Through its persistent efforts to publish newsletters and flyers hostile to the regime, this press system flourished as martial rule wore on.

According to Marcos laws, these publications were illegal, but so numerous some of them were soon being circulated freely, and the regime could no longer physically stop them. It continued to arrest critical editors and writers, but the proliferation of “alternative newspapers”–and alternative news agencies like PNF–specially after the assassination of former Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino in 1983 at the Manila International Airport made thorough suppression impossible.

At the same time, what has come to be known as “Xerox journalism” flourished. This consisted of distributing photocopied articles from foreign publications-articles which, at times unwittingly, exposed the corruption and extravagance of the regime, among them a frankly adoring article in the American magazine Cosmopolitan which ranked Imelda Marcos’ wealth with those of Queen Elizabeth II and the tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Though a legitimate response to the dearth of reliable information, Xerox journalism was a transient phenomenon known only to a small segment of Philippine society–those with access to foreign publications through various means, particularly through relatives in the United States.

The alternative press was far more crucial in providing Filipinos the information they needed during a period of repression. Conventional wisdom in the Philippines regards the alternative press as a recent phenomenon, but the tradition actually goes back to the late 19th century, during the reformist, and later, the revolutionary period, when the reformists first published “La Solidaridad” (Solidarity), and the revolutionaries, “Kalayaan” (Freedom) in the course of the campaign for reforms and later, the revolution against Spanish rule.

What distinguished this press was its advocacy and courage, made possible during the Spanish period by the involvement of writers without political and economic interests to protect within the political, economic and social system they were challenging.

During the American colonial period (1899- 1941), this tradition receded before the upsurge of the “mainstream” press, with its economic and political interests rooted in the colonial regime. (The first English language newspapers in the Philippines were owned by shipping interests.) From the turn of the century to 1941, this press developed as the voice of business and political interests, establishing thereby a pattern of ownership that survives to this day. When the Japanese invaded and occupied the Philippines (1941 to 1944), this press capitulated with hardly a struggle, and became the mouthpiece of the Japanese conquerors. With information a monopoly of the Japanese puppet government, the alternative press once again assumed the responsibility of providing through clandestine publications the information the people needed. The first manifestations of the rebirth of the alternative press were the guerilla publications which eventually developed into full-fledged underground newspapers, and proliferated throughout the archipelago, challenging the credibility of the captive press.

When the Japanese were defeated and Philippine independence from the United States was proclaimed in 1946, the mainstream press once again assumed dominance. As in the past, this press was easily subdued and effectively regulated during the martial law period, its basic weakness being its ownership by political and economic interests the survival of which depended on capitulation to and collaboration with whatever government was in power. Free from these pressures, the alternative press tradition once more assumed the responsibility of providing the people with the information they needed to overthrow the dictatorship and restore democratic institutions.

The true history of the Philippine press is indeed that of the alternative press, with its immense contributions to the 100-year Filipino struggle for national independence, social change, democratization, and justice. It is a press for the periods of adversity and challenge that has characterized the turning points of Philippine history, among these the Revolution of 1896, the American conquest (1899), the Japanese Occupation (1941-1944), and the Marcos Dictatorship (1972-1986). Emerging from the period of dictatorship which it helped overthrow, it was in this press where resided widespread hopes for a journalism that would assist the emergence of a society of justice, freedom and prosperity.

In 1986 the alternative press itself consisted of two streams, however. There was the progressive stream, with its radical critique of Philippine society, and its vision of an alternative economic, political and social system. There was also the liberal stream, with its reformist outlook and its basic faith in the justice and wisdom of the existing system. In the years after the 1986 EDSA (People Power) Revolt, this stream, though retaining its liberal outlook, became itself as much a part of the establishment as the conservative press, which during the Marcos period had been so supportive of the regime.

This stream still exists today, though only in token form, and mostly only in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the rest of its partisans, like the old Malaya, having metamorphosed into firm supporters of the establishment. What is left of the alternative tradition in the Inquirer has meanwhile yielded to the pressure of commercial interest, although the Inquirer still retains an erratic, and at times unpredictable, adversarial relationship with government.

Meanwhile, the conservative wing of the Philippine press, to which the other broadsheets based in Manila overwhelmingly belong, has been driven into further timidity. Only five newspapers with small circulations published the PCIJ report on Mr. Estrada’s unexplained wealth, while the Inquirer, the Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Star–the Big Three in terms of circulation–chose not to publish it.

At the same time, there is a growing number of reports of columns being censored, as well as instances of self-censorship. The PCIJ’s Sheila Coronel also said during a press forum last August that there is increasing resistance among editors to publish pieces critical of government, particularly PCIJ reports.

Most of the broadsheets show their support for the government of President Estrada in many, often obvious, ways. One newspaper’s banner stories for nine consecutive days last summer were all on Estrada. Another has several columnists uniformly praising everything the government does daily, even as it concentrates on fashions and other trivia as the staples of its news, including its front page, reporting. Still another has government officials for columnists, and makes it a point to publish government-issued press releases on the front page.

Perhaps worst of all in the present context of events, a study by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility of five Manila broadsheets including the Big Three revealed that from March to June this year, they had not only failed to provide the contextual information needed for readers to understand the crisis in the Muslim areas of Mindanao. Several commentators had actually fomented anti-Muslim prejudices through hate articles that identified terrorism with Muslims as an ethnic group. These were in addition to these newspapers’ overwhelming dependence (80% of the time) on government sources, and their concentration on news stories that would sell newspapers rather than enlighten readers on a complex and destructive conflict.

Some of the practitioners responsible for these horrors are in the payroll of government and other allied interests, but others simply share the government’s ideological framework and the fear of change that is strangely rampant among the professional classes.

But what drive Philippine newspapers are their commercial and political interests–interests tied up with government, interests for the preservation of which government favor or disfavor is vital. Last year the Philippine government showed how vital government approval or lack of it can be. First President Estrada sued the Manila Times for libel–for a report which said that he had been the “unwitting ninong” (godfather) in an anomalous government transaction. The owners apologized, and then, in fear of tax audits and other government action, sold the newspaper to Estrada associate Mark Jimenez. Infuriated by the Inquirer’s supposedly biased reporting and its focus on his person, Mr. Estrada convinced his film producer friends to withdraw their advertisements from the newspaper, resulting in revenue losses of some P100 million for your favorite newspaper and mine.

The demonstration effect of these moves was not lost on the press, the vulnerability of which rests on its ownership by various private groups with diverse political and economic interests. Fear–of government displeasure, of advertisers, and of financial losses–has made an already timid press even more timid, even as, themselves sharing the ideological assumptions of a political and economic system of which they are a part, individual practitioners as well as entire news organizations never quite succeed in examining the roots of the Philippine crisis.

The result is intellectual compromise and less than rigorous analysis, as well as reporting that goes only so far–seemingly critical but never really forthright insofar as the fatal limitations of Philippine democracy, and therefore the need for mass empowerment, are concerned. The Philippine mainstream press, though widely regarded as free and rambunctious, never goes far enough in its reporting and analysis of crucial issues, both for fear of the consequences as well as for its own ideological sympathies with a state of things it claims to abhor, but has always championed.

No laws regulate the Philippine press. But what do regulate it are extra legal forces–the power of government over the business enterprises of media owners, the power of the advertisers, and the ideological shackles that unbeknownst to many practitioners shape their responses to public issues and thus make the educative tasks of journalism in a society in crisis extremely difficult.

Yet the need for the democratization of a society still burdened by authoritarian legacies grows ever more urgent, even as poverty has worsened, and justice remains more elusive than ever. What the Philippine experience has so painfully demonstrated is that a free press is not achieved simply through the absence of official regulation, and that a free press even when achieved does not necessarily lead to a society of justice, freedom and democracy.

However, even in these circumstances there are encouraging signs, among them the existence and growth of a corps of dissident practitioners who see the limitations of their own coverage, who daily test the political, economic and ideological limits erected by the ownership system, and who hunger for a truly relevant journalism that owes its allegiance first and last to the people and their historical quest for a free society.

They are everywhere in Philippine newspapers–in Manila as well as in the communities, and as reporters, columnists and even editors–seeking the information that would help Filipinos understand their own society and its problems, and engaging newspaper decision makers in daily struggles to get the news out to a people hungry for information, and what is equally important, interpretation. Successors to the alternative press practitioners of these many past decades, they are the reason why, despite the political economy of the Philippine press, critical articles and news vital to public understanding of recent events still manage to be published. Despite a military-imposed news blackout, for example, reporters on the ground in Jolo island managed to get information on the toll on the civilian population of the Philippine military’s ongoing assault on the Abu Sayyaf group launched September 16. And of course there are the PCIJ practitioners among others, with their determined pursuit of information to document and bring to the attention of readers the actual state of the Filipino nation.

These are the practitioners to watch, not the predictable yes men and women in the power structure of the Philippine press to whom approval of what exists is second nature. These are the practitioners upon whom has fallen the responsibility of deepening the Filipino people’s understanding of the issues of authoritarian governance, foreign dictation, and poverty–and all their attendant horrors including cronyism, corruption, gross incompetence, and official lawlessness not only at the Department of Education but also at the highest levels of the so-called government of the Philippines. This is the urgent task of the alternative tradition today, and investigative journalism is its primary vehicle.

The investigative report is the most logical form for the need to demonstrate and document in all its painstaking detail and sordidness the political and social realities that still define Filipino existence today, towards the historic end of arming the people with the consciousness that will mobilize them. It is also the one form that can repudiate the martial law legacy of secrecy that still haunts us all. Of all the journalistic forms it is the investigative report–with its demand for consummate research and precise attribution–that lends itself to the deepening of public understanding of the way the political, economic and social systems work for the benefit of a handful and to the detriment of the many.

Whether at the community or national level, all issues that touch upon the way people live are people’s issues. These issues range from the need for day care centers for working mothers to the undeclared martial law in Jolo. Whether by documenting corruption or environmental degradation, child labor or the manipulation of the stock market, the investigative report can help put an end to both the ignorance as well as the legacy of secrecy that are among the instruments that help keep Philippine society what it is for the overwhelming majority of the people–a society of vast injustice and even greater misery. For the investigative report to do this will require, as we have seen lately, the practitioner’s continuing engagement in the daily struggles in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Philippine newspapers. That is another story for another time, but that engagement is crucial to getting the news out.

(Delivered during the 14th anniversary celebration of Philippine News and Features on September 29, 2000, at the UP Balay Kalinaw in Quezon City.)