DURING last week’s monthly general assembly meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce, the organizers invited a rather untypical guest.
Normally, it’s speakers from the private sector who would be invited to speak on various topics of interest. At certain times, there would be people from government who would come over, and talk about government legislation, public policy issues and the like.
This time, AmCham decided on a figure who is decidedly not your typical business person. Slight of build, and somewhat shy and soft-spoken, she isn’t someone that I would usually associate with these business fora. But there she was, speaking to all of us, and sharing her experiences as founder of Rappler, the pioneering media organization in the country, who now seems to be the lone voice of dissent consistently standing up for principled journalism, helping us sift through the news of the times, and separating the real from the fake kind.
Maria Ressa doesn’t come across as a crusader-type figure. And yet, in a country deeply divided by a president who continues to push the envelope in terms of presidential good behavior, her organization seems to be the only one standing in the way of the country becoming a total media black hole, where all truth get sucked into, and disappear forever into nothingness.
I came of age in a time when one man ruled the country with an absolute iron fist. Back in the day when Marcos was in power, all of the country’s media outlets were nothing short of brainwashing vehicles, spouting what seemed like press releases coming straight from the government’s propagandists. So total and complete was Marcos’ control over the truth that reality and fantasy became almost impossible to disentangle. Stories of his exploits and his wartime valor became part of popular lore, with most Filipinos actually believing that he was a living and breathing war hero. This, of course, only served to endear him even more to the military, the one group that he relied upon to cement his hold on absolute power. After all, who would not be in total awe of a commander-in-chief who was heroism in the flesh? A soldier who, in defense of the fatherland, supposedly fought against overwhelming odds, and who risked his life for the freedom of his country?
Media made Marcos a legend in the Filipino psyche, and through total control and manipulation of the country’s news outlets, he was able to perpetuate himself in power for a very long time.
Maria Ressa spoke about how today, a similar situation exists with the current president. Skillfully manipulating public opinion by astute use of social media proxies, he has been able to accumulate power of such terrifying proportions that by some reckoning, he is even more powerful today than Marcos was at his strongest. Scary, right?
Scary indeed. Because we all see it unfolding right before our very eyes at warp speed. In Marcos’ time, news cycles were longer than they are today. With social media, lies and misinformation spread with terrifying speed. And where in Marcos’ time it was easier to identify media bias and discount the veracity of the news accordingly, today these lines are opaque and blurry. What is fake and what is real news is often very difficult to tell apart for an educated audience. Imagine then what an impossible task it is for the less informed?
Which makes the role of principled and independent media outlets like Rappler even that much more critical to the functioning of a country like the Philippines. With many of our countrymen unwitting accomplices to the spread of biased and sometimes altogether fake news, we rely on media outlets of their kind to call out misinformation, guard against deception, and always speak truth to power.