EdCom did not mention mass communication or journalism courses. Nevertheless, these courses rank among the most popular for high school graduates who regard them as passports to glamorous jobs as news anchors or newspaper columnists. The Commission on Higher Education Communication Committee has found that, in apparent indication of the popularity of what most students refer to as “masscomm,” over a hundred schools all over the country from Bukidnon in the South to Laoag in the North offer mass communication, communication, journalism or broadcasting degree courses.

These schools graduate literally hundreds each year, among whom only a very few manage to get into the media-related professions (among them advertising, public relations, marketing research and public information). In the media professions themselves, meaning in print journalism, broadcasting (both TV and radio), as well as film, only a very precious few jobs are available each year.

Limited Market
The job market is so limited in journalism, for example, that most new graduates who decide to go into journalism practice are forced to work as correspondents, with only a few managing to land regular jobs in the Manila broadsheets. Even University of the Philippines graduates who are scholars of the Philippine Daily Inquirer–a privilege that includes being hired upon graduation–are not assured of jobs in that newspaper, and neither are UP-s honor graduates.

The alternative of working for the community press is as limited. It is true that there are occasional job opportunities in places like Cebu where community newspapers are prospering. Cebu’s case, however, is the exception rather than the rule, and in most other communities the newspapers are run on shoe-string budgets by over-worked and underpaid staff members, among whom hiring new graduates is the least pressing concern.

The plain fact is that, despite the proliferation of broadsheets and tabloids in Manila and certain other Philippine cities like Cebu, the Philippine press industry is not growing enough to hire the manpower expansion would require.

Some would argue that the Philippine press is not growing at all, despite the value that Philippine society supposedly places on the media as instruments of democratization, primarily because such a growth is first of all dependent on economic factors, among them the health of those corporations whose products need to advertise in the media, as well as the health of the economy overall.

At the same time, growth via increased circulation is equally problematic, again because of the country’s economic difficulties–which, so the argument goes, forces people to forego newspapers in favor of food and other necessities.

Meanwhile, the staff turnover among Manila’s nine broadsheets is not sufficiently high to admit all of the thirty or so journalism graduates from just the University of the Philippines each year. This is of course a given, dependent entirely on average life expectancies and the individual practitioners’ decades of productive capacity, and about which nothing much can be done except perhaps forced retirement policies at a certain age on the part of the broadsheets.

Some journalism or communication graduates, however, choose not to practice as journalists because they want to do something else. It may not be typical of all journalism/mass communication schools, but in the University of the Philippines barely five out of a class of 20-30 eventually go into journalism.

Disillusioned graduates
The rest decide to either study further, or go into advertising or public relations, or–an even fewer number–to work as information staff in advocacy organizations. Part of the reason seems to be disillusionment over the profession, which many UP students specially the truly gifted and sensitive eventually come to regard as both low-paying and a dead-end career and as inhabited by corrupt though self-righteous practitioners.

In one journalism graduating class of 30 in UP, for example, several went to the study of law, and masters’ degrees in other disciplines. Still others became public information officers in government offices including the Senate and the House of Representatives. At least three became information officers in people’s organizations. One became the spokesperson of an NGO. Two became news writers for television. Only five went into print journalism.

The decision not to go into journalism does mean less pressure on the mass media professions. But it also means limiting to the relatively less gifted the choices of newspapers whenever job openings become available. This helps explain why many editors complain that too many of those they hire as reporters are either unskilled or lack sufficient knowledge of government, business and economics, international relations and those other areas reporters are expected to cover intelligently. What they don’t know is that, at least in the case of UP, only a very few of the truly gifted decide to go into newspaper work.

In this the newspapers themselves have a share of responsibility. Despite their claims at stringent skills requirements, their accuracy, fairness, balance, and even grammatical records as well as reputations for corruption, conflicts of interest and bias are the stuff of much of the discussions in journalism ethics courses.

Equally legendary are the low salaries they pay, the terrible working conditions, and worst of all, the absence of opportunities for professional growth in organizations in which editors’ biases are demonstrated daily in the distortion of news stories that appear under the bylines of reporters who can barely recognize the finished product–and who nowadays are no longer told why their stories have been so mangled.

Equal responsibility
What editors forget is that their newspapers cannot escape responsibility in the making of a journalism that attracts, in too many cases, only the less gifted as well as the desperate. EdCom pointed this out in 1990, except that it was referring to the teaching profession, which because it paid so little and demanded so much in terms of keeping the goodwill of superiors and discharging a legion of responsibilities other than teaching, has over the years diminished in stature, today attracting the less gifted in contrast to the past when teaching paid well and teachers had status. Philippine journalism appears to be in the very same state, which among other implications suggests even more forcefully that the development of the mass media, specifically of journalism in the Philippines, is the responsibility not only of the schools and individual practitioners, but also of the mass media organizations both as exemplars as well as employers.

Despite poverty and economic decline, the media can actually be as indispensable to the citizenry as food and water, as they are in certain societies, so long as they provide the information people need to make the decisions crucial to their lives and to the life of society. But the media can create the audiences that they need for growth only if they are perceived to be discharging the role of information-provider with skill, responsibility, and knowledge.

The decision-makers (whether editors or publishers) in the profession of journalism, instead of constantly carping at how inferior work applicants are, can actually contribute to that process by being the living examples of competence and rectitude for future practitioners to emulate if they are to attract the most skilled and most ethically-conscious graduates. It will not do to expect of new graduates what they do not expect of themselves.

It is equally important that the media pay professional wages in return for professional performance. The editors and publishers complain about the quality of those who apply to them, but forget that by offering what amounts to a pittance, they risk, and usually succeed in, getting exactly what they pay for, meaning the relatively unskilled, many of whom end up augmenting meager incomes by accepting the usual envelopes.

Audience growth
The growth of the audiences that will stimulate advertising and boost circulations will in turn sustain and fuel the growth of the job market for new graduates that under existing circumstances is severely limited. Working conditions in which skill as well as ethics are primary qualifications and in which excellent work is rewarded fairly, by attracting the more skilled among journalism and communication graduates, can thus contribute to the widening of the job market that can only be the result of the media’s own growth and development.

Of course steps will have to be taken to curb the excessive proliferation of schools that offer communication degree courses, among which far too many, says CHED, are substandard in terms of faculty, facilities and curricula. This is a decision the government must make, as painful and as politically perilous as it may be.

The schools concerned may argue that “MassComm” is popular, and that, though they do profit from it, they’re only giving high school graduates what they want, implying thereby that government decision makers, so dependent on popularity surveys and opinion polls, should think twice about before biting that bullet.

In harnessing the will to do something about it, the government could take heart by recalling that it is equally true that many of the 100 or so communication schools in this country also mislead their students by making them believe that after four years they will end up celebrity practitioners like Cheche Lazaro or Max Soliven.

This is an illusion far crueler than the truth that in the poor country that is the Philippines, the media professions, like most others, is in far less need of new graduates than of new perspectives. The job market for journalism graduates is a shoe into which not all can fit; and sometimes the foot has to be cut to fit the shoe.

(Philippine Journalism Review, April-May 2000)

Thus is news defined with great difficulty even by experienced practitioners and academics. A quick scan of the usual attempts at definition, to start with, reveals funda-mental disagreement over whether it refers to an occur-rence in time and space, or to the account of that occurrence.

The disagreement is equaled by disputes over what characteristics define news. Although there does appear to be agreement over such factors as timeliness, reader/viewer interest, and significance, there is at the same time skepticism among certain practitioners and even academics (the late Curtis McDougal of Interpretative Reporting fame being among the latter) over either the wisdom or the possibility of ever arriving at an objective definition of it.

“News is what the editors say it is,” is a virtual mantra among the more hardboiled practitioners in the Philippines, among whom we find that generation glibly described as belonging to the “the old school.” Their “definition” suggests that many editors define news on the wing—or, as Edmund Lambeth (Committed Journalism) puts it, intuitively and on an ad hoc basis: they know news when they see it.

This generation—mostly practitioners who made their way through journalism without the curse (or benefit) of too much formal training— scoffs at the idea of journalism’s serving ends other than keeping the public interested in buying newspapers, and making the owners happy.

They are skeptical to the point of cynicism. They similarly reject any suggestion that the news should keep the public informed for any purpose beyond itself. They reject—correctly, it seems to this sometime practitioner who lived through the martial law period—any notion of the press’ serving a “developmental” purpose.

The skepticism does help pre-vent the errant nonsense implicit in the view that the news, even before it’s written, must serve a purpose predetermined by reporter and/or editor—or that to serve a public purpose, the news must be “good news.” But it also reduces the news function to the simple expedient of reporting whatever editors believe will interest the public at any given time— whether it be the current Philippine President’s terno of choice for her next State of the Nation Address, or Kris Aquino’s most recent romantic involvement.

The skepticism notwithstanding, they would probably reject McDougal’s (Interpretative Reporting, 1990) definition. Yet McDougal is as hardboiled as they come, focused on the news’ seeming undefinability beyond the political and economic interests that drive news in free market societies (news, says McDougal, is “anything a newspaper prints for profit”).

McDougal’s definition, however, does focus on that aspect of the news function which, while exerting the most influence on it, too many practitioners refuse to discuss, even if they’ve had first-hand experience with it: that news is often defined as anything that can sell more copies in furtherance of the newspaper organization’s goals as a commercial enterprise.

For all this, however, and as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jack Fuller (News Values, 1996) suggests, it is possible to approximate a definition of news that’s not wholly subjective, and which looks beyond the journalist’s (or the owners’) personal preferences.

News is first of all an account of something recent (timeliness). It is also a report that is of interest to readers, and third, significant to them not only because it can affect their lives, but also because it happened in their immediate community (proximity and relevance).

Larger truths
Even more critically, news must be accurate, and not only in the sense that it gets the names, dates and places right, but also in terms of presenting “the larger truths” in a given issue and in society in general. Is the head of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) Hashim Salamat or Salamat Hashim? Getting the name right is important, but of equal importance are the demands of the MILF as a key to understanding the “larger truth” about the “Bangsa Moro problem” (the MILF’s preferred term to describe what it wants to address).

Though a seemingly simple injunction, being accurate has proven to be problematic, it seems specially for Filipino journalists, many of whom not only have the usual vices of certain journalists everywhere (incompetence, an inability to listen, malice), but who also compound those vices with the difficulties of wrestling with a foreign language.

In the Philippine setting the results can be dismaying if not disastrous, specially when the inaccuracies are committed by a newspaper powerful enough to determine the subject of national discourse merely through the expedient of putting it in large type on the front page. The Philippine Daily Inquirer, for example, misread a statement by the National Democratic Front’s Jose Ma. Sison, in which he suggested that among the New People’s Army’s possible respon-ses to a “total war” policy by government could be its destroying power lines. For some reason the reporter said Sison had “call(ed) on” and even “ordered” the NPA to destroy power lines, thus setting off predictably belligerent reactions from various sources including the Philippine military, senators and congressmen—all of whom assumed the truth of the Inquirer report.

Accuracy for democratization
If inaccurate reporting can escalate war rhetoric, endanger peace processes and even set off a chain of events that can lead to actual conflict, on the other hand, accuracy can help a community acquire the understanding of events and their contextualization critical to democratization. A report that gets the names, places and dates right, and at the same time provides background and explanation, can do wonders in empowering a community towards making it aware not only of the dimensions of its problems, but also of the possibilities for its solution.

Many journalists, however, will frown at the suggestion that part of their work is that of suggesting, implying, or even reporting possible solutions to the problems they report, sometimes with studied exaggeration. They limit themselves to uncovering and describing problems in the belief that their public responsibility ends with the last paragraph in an expose on say, the destruction of the environment in a particular locality.

But as the late editor Jenkin Lloyd Jones said more than forty years ago (“The Inexact Science of Truth Telling,” The Press and the Public Interest, 1968), “the newspaper’s obligation to the welfare of the community is…fundamental.”

The practitioner, in the first place, is a citizen who only happens to be a journalist, either out of choice or happenstance, who does not turn in his citizenship at the newsroom door. The journalist “should be equally the citizen, participating to the fullest in the life and aspirations of his (community).” (Hodding Carter, “The Editor as Citizen,” Ibid.)

No authentic journalist can claim without lying that he or she is unconcerned with the issues that confront his community, whether it be the entire nation or the municipality of his birth and/or residence. His or her concern—or at least his/her interest— is usually evident in the way he/she chooses which events to report on, in the emphasis he/she gives certain aspects of that event, and in the way he/she exercises the selectivity inherent in reporting.

Despite what should be a self-evident fact, many reporters and editors shun any engagement with their respective communities beyond reporting its problems. Instead of meaningful engagement, the result is distance, from where the journalist—into whose head both the schools as well as older practitioners have drummed the idea of neutrality and objectivity in the sense of non-involvement— reports on events observed without being part of them.

And yet both engagement in the affairs of the community and neutrality are possible, if we define neutrality as it should be defined: as signifying that respect for the facts and the responsibility of truth-telling inherent in the primary responsibility of the journalistic enterprise.

The test of facts
A conflict between respecting the facts, and reporting the truth and community advocacy and engagement, arises only when the reporter distorts the news, or withholds essential information for the sake of proving his or her advocacy correct. One’s advocacy or engagement in the community, rather than an excuse for false reporting, should on the contrary be valid enough to stand the test of the facts; it is otherwise a cause unworthy of anyone.

What this means is that the journalist commits no violence to the responsibility of truth-telling if, after exposing a bad situation, or identifying and describing a problem as a newsworthy subject, he or she proceeds to suggest options to address it which the community can discuss.

This approach is in fact validated by the need, increasingly urgent in the Philippines, for its citizens to gain a better appreciation of the state of their country and community, and what can be done about it.

On an almost daily basis, however, the news is in practice limited to the gleeful presentation of the country’s problems, which one suspects has contributed immen-sely to the near universal despair and help-lessness regnant in Philippine society.

Instead of empowering citizens this approach does exactly the opposite—whereas, as has been demonstrated in countries in far worse situations than the Philippines, no citizenry is so powerless that it cannot, once armed with the information vital to decision making, exercise the sovereign power to make choices.

(PHILIPPINE JOURNALISM REVIEW, August 2002)