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Monday, September 20, 2004
Editorial: Greeneland revisited
IF there were a Madonna filling in as patron saint for journalists, chances are she would be blessing and taunting the confused members of the press peopling Graham Greene’s novels.
Greene, an Oxford don who became a newspaper editor, wrote novels examining how grand movements—the religious persecution in Mexico, the civil strife in Vietnam, South Africa and Havana—affected the lives of ordinary people caught in the maelstrom.
Clinging at the periphery of this political and personal turbulence was the quintessential Greene journalist: someone whose insistence on impartiality and disengagement approached the obsessional. However, the journalist-character’s decisions and actions invariably had the opposite effect of sinking the Fourth Estate inextricably deeper into, what Greene called, “the heart of the matter.”
Misstep
Greene, who converted into Catholicism late in life, is familiar with agnostics and their tortured wandering into territories that tested all beliefs, including the insistence that nothing was worthy of belief.
In his 1955 novel “The Quiet American,” the narrator, a seasoned foreign correspondent, mocks a minor American official channeling aid to a rebel group in the Franco-Vietminh war. After witnessing how the American’s interventions result in more bloodshed, the reporter comments on the terrifying nature of “innocence at large: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
Cynicism, not blood, courses in the veins of Greene’s journalist-narrator who spares no one, not even himself: “I was a man without a vocation—one cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation.”
To some extent, this self-mockery is justified. Greene respects the reporter covering the field but is scathing about the writer shaping opinions: “a superior sort of journalist. (who) gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea.”
Engaged
For all the posturing his journalist-characters make, Greene is a press ally under deep cover. He bares the brittleness of judgment that values as “news,” for instance, the death of women and infants in a parade bombing, but not that of soldiers. Greene contends that this selective perception and dissemination of filtered views is anathema to the journalistic dilemma of covering the truth while engaged in a gray duty “to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.”
Contrary then to the idea that a journalist is detached from and thus superior to the coverage, the press “belongs” to its milieu. This belongingness is less the condition of a performer who wanders into the stage when it is not yet his cue. It is more of the quandary of a letter or even a punctuation that, in the context of a sentence, is altered by and alters the meaning in that string of symbols.
Continuing past
Following a tradition started in September 1994, the local press leads the community in observing Cebu Press Freedom Week.
This celebration remains to be the only one of its type in the whole country. First organized by the Cebu Council of Media Leaders (CCML), the week seeks to “remind the public and the press itself that the precious freedom it now enjoys must be protected from any and all threats.”
In 1998, the Cebu working media agreed to time the observance with Sept. 21 as it was during Martial Law that the most flagrant violations of the press were carried out.
Although 2004 is not 1972, the year foists self-contemplation even on a profession notoriously addicted to deadlines and changes. Among the things a post-9/11 world woke up to is that there are no “post” scenarios. There is only a continuum: if journalists disappeared in 1972, they are still murdered in 2004. If 1972 muzzled the freedom of speech, today’s readers and news sources are asserting their right to reply.
By many indicators, the Cebu media today bears striking resemblance to Greeneland. Cebu Press Freedom Week is then a timely sabbatical to reflect on journalism’s curse-blessing: “You (referring to the journalist) must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. You’re engaged, like the rest of us.”
(September 20, 2004 issue)
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