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Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Pooled editorial: An itch to stampede
Cebu Press Freedom Week provides, for those of us who work in this complex challenging craft, and those we serve, an occasion to backtrack to basics. We err if we devalue annual rites to sterile “navel gazing.”
Our deadlines are unrelenting. Nonetheless, we must pause to ask: Where do we stand? How did we perform yesterday? Will we do better at our jobs tomorrow? And what is it we‘re supposed to do anyway?
In a democracy, the press reports and comments on “issues that affect the lives of citizens and helps them make choices that shape the nation’s future.
“At it’s best, the press is a servant and guardian of institutions,” Walter Lippman wrote. “At it’s worst, it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.”
The ante for excellence in journalism is jacked up in “constrained democracies” like the Philippines. Institutions rebuilt from the Marcos’ dictatorship’s scorched earth policy, and by shaky regimes that followed, remain frail.
Social upheavals
“Out here on the edge,” media finds itself reporting on Lippman’s exploiters of social upheavals: power seekers who constantly besiege brittle agencies from Congress, courts, the military, local governments to the Commission on Elections.
Thus, the press tracked the “Brat Pack’s” attempt to impeach Supreme Court chief justice Hilario Davide who ruled on the notorious coconut levy and crony loot. With terms lapsing, congressmen massage media to chain-saw Cebu into four miniscule provinces and create retirement havens. And power seekers ratchet pressure on an embattled President, on front pages and prime time.
Media’s task of sifting facts from allegation, spin from argument is helped—or complicated, some say—by the “new kid on the block”; poll takers. Have surveys become unaccountable king makers? And in candid moments, editors agree that opinion seeps into news columns as reporters morph into advocates.
This erodes our most critical asset: crebility. “I want no part of what has to be called the lynch-mob mentality that seems to grip this nation,” the no-nonsense columnist and commentator Solita Monsod wrote.
This itch to stampede is “fed by, I`m sorry to say, the media, which, more often than I am comfortable with, cannot seem to distinguish between generating news and reporting it..At most only feeble attempts to bring balance” were attempted, she griped.
Call
“Most of those making the noise are also-rans and people with self-serving agenda, (i.e. Lippman’s exploiters), Monsod says. “We should all refuse to be railroaded by these people who don’t want facts to get in the way of their ambitions.”
This is a call for return to basics in a country where hoodwinking is the rule, whether on “Garci tapes,” Cebu’s runaway yen loans, treadmill scandal frenzies or mindless noontime soap operas.
Do we square with the ethical standards that our craft demands if we report, like a tape-recorder, bogus claims? Or must we background patently false public statements with facts and context? “Are we garbage collectors or journalists?”, New York Times’ Abe Rosenthal once asked.
We all need to hone the competence and stiffen backbones to correct the record. Otherwise, politicians will continue to dupe us. In this abdication of duty, we squander, rather than enhance, journalism’s most critical asset: credibility.
Freedom Forum simplifies this festering issue into a mathematical formula: “Accuracy + balance + completeness + detachment + ethics = fairness.”
Sound chamber
Others prefer the visual image. There’s the “society’s sound chamber,” offered by Harvard University’s Louis Lyons who oversaw sabbatical for editors as Nieman Fellows.
By their calling, journalists are locked into society’s sound chamber. Lyons taught. There, a babel of voices batter them as they huddle in the chamber’s middle. A cacophony erupts from strong voices to weak voices; rising voices and those fading; shrill screams to whimpers or modulated tones.
Amidst this bedlam, the journalist must listen, Lyons said. And out of this chaos, he must extract what is significant, relevant and true. Above all, he must think for himself.
It’s the only way to serve those the journalist writes for or broadcasts to. There’s no other throughway to full stature.
Technology meanwhile radically recasts out tools. Email and the cellphone, for example, have whittled away at the traditional face-to-face oversight that editors exercised over reporters.
“Thirty years ago, there was no Internet, no cable tv, no online newspapers, no blogs,” recalls Richard Posner in his book: "Bad News." The public’s consumption of the news used to be like sucking on a straw. Now it’s being sprayed like a firehose…”
Journalism is not for fat cats or complacent lapdogs. Truth is not antiseptic. Press Freedom Week reminds us that ours is a rough, raw, sometimes brutal craft.
We write or broadcast “to make sure the world knows what’s happening in what would otherwise be the dark recesses of people behaving at their worst,” says the Guardian’s Peter Preston.
Some do this task brilliantly. Many just get by. Some are incompetent. And others sell out and should be fired.
As “prisoners of a necessary cause,” we all must stand against the tide for we will encounter opposition, contusion, sometimes personal peril. “But you have to be on the side of (freedom) Because there’s no other side to be on.” |
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