Monday, July 07, 2008 Valdehuesa: Media need responsible owners By Manuel Valdehuesa Street Talk
MEDIA practitioners as a class are well-meaning people. Many are idealists who strive to serve the community by giving voice to its problems and championing its interests. Concerned about honesty and good governance, they expose corruption and denounce inefficiency. To promote order and propriety, they attack disorderly conduct or blow the whistle on wrongdoers. It is an essential role, a civilizing one and to the extent that they do it evenhandedly, they deserve the community's gratitude.
Owners of media are something else. Invisible to the community, their sense of social responsibility or duty as citizens is less clear. One can only view them through the prism of what programs and reports their networks offer. It speaks poorly of their social responsibility, for instance, if there's too much of the bizarre and abnormal in the content of their programs or if they rely mainly on police blotters for their reports -- making it seem as if all that's happening is abnormal, criminal or wrong.
Focusing excessively on the negative or the sensational, on the trivial or the self-serving, distorts community life. Indiscriminate advertising also adds to the distortion -- as when they mock truth or accuracy with unproven claims of medicinal value in herbal items. Would networks show the same programs if their owners are required to watch them? Would their families patronize their own networks? Would Shane products be advertised if media owners are made to use them for their ailments?
As members of the community, media owners have a special duty to be cultured, caring and sensitive. Their livelihood directly affects the mental health and quality of life of their neighbors. Unless there is balance or objectivity in their reportage, it could breed cynicism and an unhealthy view of reality, driving the ignorant and the weak to escapist pastimes like drugs, drink, vice or fantasy. Bad reporting can project the impression that nothing is growing and everything is decomposing.
If there are reckless or corrupt media practitioners, the owners are to blame. It means the owners are also reckless and are favorably disposed towards the corrupt. Owners hire corrupt reporters and announcers, not vice versa. Owners recruit them and set them loose on society. Mercenary owners attract mercenary workers and pedantic upstarts that bring discredit to the media profession and industry.
There are Tigbas Boys who exploit press freedom and make a living from extortion and blackmail. There are pretentious announcers and block-timers who treat accuracy, pronunciation or vocabulary as if broadcasting has nothing to do with them. And there are misguided writers who view journalism as nothing more than stringing words together with little regard for grammar, syntax or style. They are able to operate because owners hire them and authorize them to obtain press cards or they are also the owners.
It's tough dealing with such phonies, especially if they intimidate the community, harangue officials, bang their fists as they poke into people's lives or flash their press cards like lights on a police car. They are disturbers, not upholders, of the social order. They owe their existence and their livelihood from reckless, irresponsible media owners.
The media are supposed to be a self-regulating industry, policing its own ranks. But that's theory, not practice. Media companies, for the most part, are really just businesses engaged in cutthroat competition. It's why they try to out-sensationalize each other in the race for audience ratings and advertising revenues. It's why they hire reporters and announcers at starvation rates (to cut costs). It's why profit will always out-vote social responsibility, ethics or quality.
And that's why we get lots of broadcast and print garbage dumped on us. Right, Romy Fortea?
A former UN executive and book publisher, Manny writes Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.
