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Sunday, March 16, 2003
Tabada: Media in time of war
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
How will the war affect Cebu’s community press?
This question loomed at the back of my mind during the March 14 McLuhan Forum.
Named after the visionary Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan, this year’s forum featured Newsbreak Magazine’s Miriam Grace Go. For winning last year’s Jaime V. Ongpin Award for Investigative Journalism, she received the top plum, the McLuhan Prize, a study tour of Canadian institutions.
Sharing her observations and insights from that exposure, Go pointed out that “the most enviable development in the mass media in Canada, as in most federal countries, is the flourishing of provincial/regional newspapers.”
Canada’s 300 local papers and magazines do not just outnumber its two national papers. Go said the local press effectively monitors civil society and government by keeping the focus on local issues and opening a forum for public debate.
The local press as the link between good governance and “real positive change” was underscored by Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines, Robert Collette. He said that a strong press questions, probes and analyzes concerns and issues, always from the standpoint that the public’s welfare is the real content of mass media.
According to Prof. Felisa Etemadi, governance specialist and faculty member of UP Cebu, this interpretation of what falls under the public’s interest is best carried out by reporters and editors, not politicians, media owners or the marketing departments of media companies. Analyzing selected local, national and international codes of ethics, Etemadi pointed out that the newsroom codes are silent, for instance, about the “hidden tensions” between marketing and editorial interests in media companies.
This threat of war, and its resulting economic dislocations, will force into the open certain priorities within news organizations. If, in the past, the educated and the middle class splurged on at least one national daily and a local paper, aside from having cable and Internet connections, media will have to cope with people’s tendency now to curb spending on information, and the shrinking of advertising in reaction to the drop in consumption and circulation.
In the scramble for economic survival, what will prevail within news organizations? Editorial values of newsworthiness or marketing?
Or, gauging by a question raised during the McLuhan Forum, the public’s perception of what is credible news?
During the open forum, a university professor asked why Sun.Star never publishes anything good about Mayor Tomas Osmeña, a political rival of the paper’s owners.
No single City Hall issue was specified to illustrate an instance when this paper failed to cover the interest of public welfare, regardless of political personalities.
No study too has been made establishing anti-Osmeña bias, based on a content analysis of this paper’s coverage of the Garcia and Osmeña administrations.
Are these points relevant at all? Or is the crux of the matter the fact that the question was asked by a member of the local intelligentsia?
Does war change the peacetime rule that marketing is only as good as the product? That, as in the taste test, news is tested through the reading, preferably critical.
How will war affect the local press?
(mqt_research@sunstar.com.ph)
(March 16, 2003 issue)
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