MEDIA practitioners now have a field guide to aid them in reporting on human rights (HR) in the country.

The 105-page handbook has four main sections—what to seek out and what to avoid, how to dig deeper into an issue without getting sidetracked by too much information, how to determine HR themes, and how to discern rights-based issues in day-today events.

COVER page of the guidebook.

The guide hopes to encourage Filipino journalists to think seriously about how they cover certain issues, especially those relating to HR, about their responsibility to do so as accurately as possible.

The handbook, “Reporting Human Rights in the Philippines, A Field Guide for Journalists and Media Workers,” was made possible through the support of the US Department of State trough the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

It was published by the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project in partnership with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), Center for Community

Journalism and Development (CCJD), the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, and MindaNews.

The publishers cited themes that reporters face on a daily basis that could be developed into multi-dimensional HR stories.

These include demolition of slum dwellings, like sidewalk clearing and urban resettlement; denial or lack of decent working conditions and minimum wages; prejudice against the disabled and elderly; discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS; child abuse, human trafficking, food scarcity; illegal detention and custodial deaths; police and military atrocities and domestic violence.

Some human rights stories that most reporters and photo journalists may have overlooked are those that most government authorities have been practicing—the parading
of victims and suspects of crimes before the media.

Denial to access to information is also another theme that should be looked into.