Philippine Communication Centrum Foundation - Knowledge Museum-Forum-Best practices-Youth

A number of media issues was in evidence during the last three months since the Philippine Journalism Review's July edition. These included the Supreme Court decision banning live media coverage during the trials of deposed president Joseph Estrada for plunder and perjury; and the banning by Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmena of reporters from Sun.Star Cebu and dyHP. Both had implications on press freedom as well as the public's right to information. There were enough practitioners in Philippine mass media to point that out, suggesting thereby that those issues are among concerns of at least some of the country's journalists.

The ban on live TV coverage was thus discussed thoroughly in the Philippine press, as well as by broadcasters. Although there was a tendency in these discussions for journalists to take positions in keeping with their political preferences, there was enough light generated in the discussions to clarify the issues involved in the ban.

On the other hand the ban on Sun.Star and dyHP reporters brought into focus the conflicts that the media ownership system in the Philippines often generate. Equally important, however, that particular case provoked a discussion on the limits of a politician's right to decide who may attend his or her press conferences. Those limits are apparently reached when a public figure's desire for favorable coverage infringes on the right of the press to have access to information in its discharge of the necessary function of providing the public the information it needs in a democratizing setting.

If these are encouraging signs, equally heartening are the efforts by practitioners - a tendency that became pronounced during the Estrada political crisis - to provide citizens information towards empowering them for clean and democratic governance. Bulatlat.com, Ngayon na, Bayan!, and MindaNews are in fact only the latest, though not the last, of the efforts by media practitioners to better serve a public hungry for meaningful information. These same efforts were evident during the late martial law period, when practitioners established news services in many regions of the country including Metro Manila to provide the information the public was not getting through the government-regulated mass media. During the Estrada political crisis, many practitioners also realized that only an informed electorate can prevent the election into office of corrupt and incompetent leaders. Out of that realization have come efforts not only to organize themselves into advocacy groups, but also to deepen their understanding of their role in contemporary Philippines. There is hope for Philippine mass media.

Journalism's underclass
Excerpts from Tonette Orejas, Philippine Journalism Review, April-June 2001.

Two years ago, community reporters and provincial correspondents for national dailies got together to form Project Bonding, otherwise known as Bonding Together for Better Journalism and Better Communities. Last year, the group distributed a questionnaire to correspondents to find out how the people on whom media companies rely on for news in far-flung places are faring.

Some 40 correspondents for national papers or broadcast stations responded to the poll. The findings were validated with leaders of local press organizations in key towns and cities, confirming that the findings affect correspondents not covered by the survey.

The results were disheartening, although not really that much of a surprise. Among the problems cited by the respondents were low remuneration, absence of security tenure, delayed payment and the high cost of producing stories. They also cited lack of time and skills, as well as lack of support from their editors. Most told of being harassed by those upset by their reports.

Except perhaps for the last item, most recognized that the root of all their difficulties was the absence of an employer-employee relationship with their news organizations. This practice frees media companies of responsibilities for the correspondents' welfare. Without employee status, correspondents are not guaranteed the coverage of labor laws. This practice has permitted what has become prevalent in the industry: the neglect and exploitation of correspondents.
Often, correspondents join news organizations without signing a contract that identifies the requirements, expectations and responsibilities of the company. Yet correspondents are expected to keep a dedicated coverage of their areas, submit news reports daily, keep stories exclusive and receive assignments on short notice. In other words, they function much like regular reporters - but without security of employment and other benefits. Only a few, in fact, get Christmas bonuses. For most, there are no such things as hazard pay, social security and medical and health insurance. They also do not get allowance for out-of-town coverage.

Correspondents have no specific beats, although most of their stories seem to be on crime, politics and governance and the environment. They submit from a low of five to high of 80 stories every month. Of these, between two to 60 would be published.

It needs to be said, however, that despite their shortcomings, there are news organizations that actually maintain the ideals of fair, balanced and responsible reporting. Either as a matter of editorial principle or as a matter of marketing strategy, news organizations do opt for stories that make sense or have impact on individuals and communities. Within news organizations are editors who remain true to the ideals of journalism and they show their trust in their correspondents by publishing their work.
Principally, news organizations will have to upgrade the status of correspondents to employees. As employees, correspondents will be guaranteed by laws to receive regular salaries, social benefits and training to develop their skills.

Philippine Media: Two streams, one tradition

(Luis Teodoro is the associate director of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, editor of the Philippine Journalism Review, and former dean of the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines-Diliman.)

The progressive role of the mass media was most visibly obvious in the political crisis which began in November last year and began to abate only after the elections of May 2001. In the crisis investigative reports played a crucial part in documenting the corruption and inefficiency that had taken residence in the highest offices of the land. Indeed those reports formed part of the documentation of the impeachment articles subsequently submitted to the Senate.

Before that crisis erupted, however, a community of journalists united by their concern both for the state of journalism as well as for the present and future of this country was already focused on such issues as the Visiting Forces Agreement, the Manila Times Libel suit and the Inquirer ad boycott, and later, the Mindanao conflict, as well as those issues of national import but which were most crucially felt at the local level such as agrarian reform, and community issues like local despotism and others.

This community of journalists is a national community which includes not only Manila-based journalists, but also those in the cities and towns in the provinces. They are not formally organized nationally, their concern for both the profession as well as the country being their common bond. They include the most visible practitioners in the broadsheets as well as those in the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and correspondents and community journalists in all the three island groups, some of whom have organized themselves at the local level in an effort to improve journalism practice as well as contribute to the transformation of Philippine politics.

One group of Mindanao journalists, for example, conducted a voter education program in the last elections between sessions on how to improve their coverage of their communities. Some twenty or so beat reporters in Manila newspapers have also organized themselves into a group they call Journalists Anonymous, in an effort to address urgent professional and ethical problems in their respective beats. In the Visayas, there are similar groups. They share a common concern for both the future of journalism as well as that of this country and are in communication with each other.

These groups' organizing themselves, as yet at the local level, only formalizes already existing, though loose formations. During previous government administrations the national community of journalists I am referring to, whose main attributes we can describe as being progressive, professional and critical, had been as engaged in the monitoring of governance, reporting on a broad range of concerns from human rights, workers' issues, and the environment - to women, children's rights, education and other social issues. In both the Ramos and Aquino governments, these concerns were evident, which is to say that the critical and progressive stream of the Philippine press has never been focused solely on Mr. Estrada, as certain of its critics often tend to suggest.

The same stream was as active during the martial law period - when, however, it was mostly underground, and at best semi-legal because of government repression. In newspapers which ranged in variety from Signs of the Times to Liberation, progressive journalists tried to provide, at great danger to themselves, their families, their fortunes and their liberties, the information the regulated press was concealing from the Filipino people.

In the latter days of the martial law regime, this tradition confronted the government through open engagement in newspapers which described themselves as "the alternative press." Although the use of that phrase tended to be limited to the description of such newspapers as the Martial law period Malaya and the Inquirer, the alternative press at that time actually included all those newspaper, whether underground or above, semi-legal or illegal, which were engaged in providing the Filipino people the information that was being denied them by the government regulated media, in which most of the practitioners dutifully did as they were told by their publishers and the Marcos government.

More importantly, however, when we speak of the alternative press we are also speaking of the progressive tradition, a press whose history goes back more than a hundred years, because the alternative press and the progressive and critical are one and the same.

If during the martial law period there were two streams in the Philippine mass media, the alternative on the one hand and on the other the subservient and government controlled, a today the same streams still exist, though they are now more commonly described as the critical and/or progressive on the one hand, and the conservative, or evasive, or even reactionary on the other.

Most of us assume that the latter is the mainstream. But that it true only in the sense that it is the dominant stream during periods of relative stability. On the contrary, the distinction of being the mainstream tradition belongs to the progressive or alternative stream, the history of which parallels that of the history of the Filipino struggle for independence, justice, and social change.

Indeed, the Filipino press was born during the reformist and revolutionary movements, first with Marcelo H. Del Pilar's Diariong Tagalog, and later with La Solidaridad, Ang Kalayaan, La Independencia, El Renacimiento, and the guerilla and underground press of the Japanese and martial law periods. The Filipino press was an alternative first to the Spanish colonial press, then to the pro-American press and the US colonial government encouraged, the Japanese controlled press, and the government regulated press of the martial law period.

Today that stream exists primarily as the alternative to the regressive journalism represented by the corrupt journalists whose meager talents are for sale to political and other interests, and whoa re in residence in newspapers whose main concern is to distort and even conceal information for the sake of the political and economic groups they represent.

To be fair, however, even in those newspapers, as in the government controlled newspapers of the martial law period, there are practitioners as concerned with doing justice to the professional demand to provide reports that are accurate and reliable, as well as relevant and complete. We saw some of this heartening fact at the height of the political crisis, when even in some of the crony newspapers the professional commitment to honest and fair reporting on the part of some practitioners could not be suppressed.

The progressive and critical tradition lives, and it lives even in places some of us would probably regard as unlikely hosts for independent practice, among them television reports aired over one TV network met only with partial success, because practically all the reporters and producers resisted censorship and engaged newsroom decision makers in a daily effort - a veritable guerilla war - to air the news that their professional standards demanded should reach the public.

Indeed, the adjective progressive, aside from being another term for alternative, is at times also only another word for professional. The experience of the journalism community in the decades from the marital law period to the present has in fact demonstrated that to live up to the professional demands of the profession - to be honest as well as persevering, to report what is happening and to comment on it as fairly and as intelligently as possible - is at the same time to be in the forefront of the common struggle being wages by the majority sectors of Philippine society for honest and patriotic governance, for authentic independence, for social change.

Like those who came before him or her, among them Marcelo H. del Pilar, Emilio Jacinto, Isabelo delos Reyes, Teodoro M. Kalaw, and in more recent times, Armando Malay, Eugenia Apostol, Antonio Zumel and Satur Ocampo, the progressive journalist is a professional because committed to the basic ethical and professional value of truth-telling.

The Filipino press tradition is by definition progressive, having been born in the period of resistance to Spanish colonial rule and nurtured by the Revolution, by the demand for independence during the American conquest, and the need for accurate, relevant information during the Japanese occupation and the martial law period.

The same responsibility in fact drives that tradition today. Only during those periods of relative stability, such as the decades following the defeat of the Revolution until the Japanese occupation, as well as that period from 1946 to 1972, and from 1986 to the present, has the conservative tradition been dominant. But during periods of upheaval, first during the reformist and revolutionary period which gave it birth, the early years of American occupation, the Japanese conquest, and the martial law period - the progressive tradition has always been there to provide the people with the information they need to understand what was happening and to help arm them with the consciousness that has enabled them to defeat tyrants whether homegrown or foreign. Bulatlat.com

Presumably, people sue for libel as a matter of honor. Well, President Estrada sued the Times expressly for that reason, and his claim to honor was modest. It lay only in his self-proclaimed virtue of incorruptibility, but he wore it as Elvis Presley wore his blue suede shoes. For the same reason that Elvis warned that you could do anything, just lay off his shoes, Mr. Estrada warned that you could call him anything but corrupt. The Times, in fact, did not call him that at all, but he imagined that it did and with malice. Actually, it simply raised the probability that he had become "an unwitting ninong" in a deal in which his office allegedly had given secret, undue favors to a bidder for a government contract.

The worst insinuation I could glean from there is that he probably was made to look like a fool, which constitutes neither libel nor, by his own definition, dishonor. But he insisted he had been libeled and dishonored, and, therefore, he sued. It would have been interesting to see how a case carrying such high political stakes might have proceeded in court. As happened, it was settled out of court on terms that could only favor Mr. Estrada: the Times apologized publicly, on page one, and he withdrew his suit. It the owners of the Times, or anyone else, thought that was the end of it they were tragically wrong. It was not a solitary case of hurt honor that could be settled with an apology, but a show of power that might well mark the reign of Estrada I. For, really, what satisfaction could Mr. Estrada have derived from an apology that acknowledged no wrong doing and was, on top of that, patently patronizing?

All that the Times apologized for was the anxiety its story had caused Mr. Estrada. But anxiety comes with the territory. It is a daily hazard of the presidency. The President is the chief natural adversary of the press in a free country, which presumably ours is, and it makes no difference even if truly he were, as the Times described Mr, Estrada, a president with a "sterling reputation... built up over decades of public service." He just has to wake up every morning prepared for the anxieties that the newspapers will, as a matter of public duty, bring him and, as a matter of privilege, not be expected to apologize for, except where they have accused him falsely or wronged him maliciously; in which case it does become a matter of honor. Clearly, that was not the case in the episode between Mr. Estrada and the Times, and, just as clearly, his wrathful protest was a reaction out of all proportion to any imaginable hurt it might have brought him.

It looks to me more like histrionics put in the service of power than genuine outrage provoked by an attack on his honor. As they say, appearances can be deceiving, and, the multi-awarded actor that he was, Mr. Estrada was not so convincing as Elvis Presley. It was his smile-the haunting smile he wore as he announced his acceptance of the Times apology-that aroused initial suspicions. It was the sort of smile you might imagine worn by the cat that swallowed the canary. (Or was it more like the canary swallowing the cat?) A further and more transparent give-away was the mockery that underlay his words to the family that owns the Times. He said they were now his friends-that was right after swallowing John Gokongwei, the family's patriarch, a taipan, a certified fat cat.

The cruelest stroke yet was the most blatant. Days later, Mr. Estrada warned the Gokongweis along with certain other fat cats of his realm, that the Bureau of Internal Revenue, one of the two most persuasive branches of the executive, the other being the police-military establishment, would descend upon them, just to make sure they had not gotten fat evading taxes. As I've said, all this was about power, and if I'm not mistaken, which I hope I am, it could be the beginning of a remake of something really dreadful that I've seen before.

No threat to press freedom

.What does a newspaper have to fear in a libel suit? If it only prints the facts and does so with no other motive than to inform its readers or help shape their opinion, nothing. That is the only advice I can offer our colleagues in the Manila Times who got President Estrada's goat after it ran a story about the alleged shenanigans surrounding the Napocor privatization deal and a couple of close-up pictures showing flies on his face. The problem is that certain quarters are trying to depict Estrada's decision to take legal action against the Times as an assault on press freedom and on the entire news media. Which it, clearly, isn't the case.

The President, both officially and otherwise, has awesome powers that he could wield to silence an implacable detractor, He could make life hell for both the staff and owners of a newspaper-or any other enterprise, for that matter-even without them knowing what hit them or where it came from. He could do all this and still behave in a perfectly civil manner with his critics. But Estrada is not one to conceal his feelings. Far from being inscrutable, he wears his heart on his sleeves so that there can be no mistaking his true sentiments. Talk about transparency. Here the nation has a Chief Executive who tells it like it is- even if his audience doesn't care for it. He is also not a behind-the-scenes operator. Unlike his predecessor, he is in the habit of doing things out in the open, although it sometimes exposes him-and his office to needless embarrassment. But that's just the way the man is. It is a quality that endeared him to millions of Filipinos who voted him into office with one of the largest mandates in the nation's history It is this mandate that Estrada apparently feels he needs to safeguard.

Although he might have been "just an actor and a small-town mayor" in the past, he now embodies the entire Republic. As such, he feels that he is entitled to a certain measure of respect-if not for himself, then for the people who made him what he is today. The owners and staff of the Times should thank their lucky stars that the President they chose to offend has opted to just bring them to court, where they would be given the chance to defend themselves. Before a competent magistrate, they will have the opportunity to prove that their report was based on nothing but the facts and that they bear no malice against Estrada, whom they described as the "unwitting godfather" of a crooked transaction. True, it would be a tough case to win, since the hearing judge might turn out to be of the sort whose dream of a loftier post which the President could make come true might becloud his ability to render a fair judgement. On the other hand, the same person at the bench could turn out to be a headline-hunting attention-grabber who would curry favor with the media and get an ego boost besides when they start describing him as a courageous magistrate.

So much has been said about the libel suit's chilling effect on the media by quarters that have conveniently forgotten that the owners of the Times, John Gokongwei et al., were not exactly uninterested observers of the Napocor privatization contract. The Gokongweis have a large stake in a company that submitted a bid for the same deal. That the authorities turned its bid down could have given the Times owners cause to cast aspersions on how a competitor was able to bag the contract. It is from this perspective that Estrada's libel suit against the Times should be viewed. It is not a David-and-Goliath confrontation; the Gokongweis are not exactly indigent litigants in this case. The owners of the Times are among the wealthiest families, not just in the Philippines, but also in Asia. At their command are resources that are awe-inspiring, to say the least. They should be able to hold their own in any legal battle, even with the President.

Let us leave all the parties involved to their own devices, and let the court do its job.

Revisiting libel

When the President goes to war with the press, it is a matter of public concern. Not that media people are easily intimidated. The best of them eat bullets for breakfast. For that matter, I do not recall any significant libel suit against a media practitioner that has prospered. I myself suspect that the libel suits filed by President Estrada and Executive Secretary Zamora will go the way of the libel suit filed by then President Cory Aquino against Luis Beltran and Max Soliven. Nevertheless, it may be worth our while to revisit the principles that protect the media from persecution of the powerful.

The prevailing doctrine on defamation makes a distinction between defamatory imputations against a private individual and defamatory imputations against a public figure and especially against an elected public official. The enhancement of the right to criticize public figures came with the scrapping of what used to be called "seditious libel." Central to our constitutional system now is the guarantee given to a "citizen critic" to criticize his government freely. The Constitution, in the words of Justice Brennan, embodies a "profound commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." This achieves a balance with the government official's broad immunity from damages when in the performance of his official duties.

The law, however, does not deny the reputational interest of a public official. Thus in 1964 an important doctrine came to be accepted which reconciles an individual's reputational interest with the interest of a citizen critic to express his views about government and about the conduct of government officials. Whereas under ordinary defamation law, every defamatory imputation is presumed to be malicious, when the object of the defamatory imputation is a public figure no such presumption of malice is recognized. The burden of proving the existence of malice is placed on the shoulders of the public figure. In the words of Justice Brennan: 'The constitutional guarantees require a federal rule that prohibits a public figure from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice' - that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

The doctrine was first applied to elected officials. Subsequent decisions extended it to nonelected officials and eventually to public figures in the private sector. Our own Supreme Court has had occasion to accept this doctrine. And since both President Estrada and Secretary Zamora certainly qualify as public figures under the doctrine, they will be able to recover damages only if they are able to prove that the statements made about them were made "with 'actual malice' - that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." The burden of proof of malice is on their shoulders.

Let us suppose that they are able to prove actual malice. How much will the award be? I suggest that, by analogy with the prohibition of "excessive fines," no award can be given which can come close to putting a newspaper out of business or to reducing an individual to beggary. But I have a better suggestion yet. It comes from an imperial decree found in the Code of Justinian which, with magnanimity befitting a person who has reached the pinnacle of popularity, says: "If anyone who knows no restraint and is a stranger to propriety thinks he must attack our names with scurrilous abuse and in his intemperance become a noisy berater of our era, we desire that he be not subjected to punishment nor suffer any harsh or severe treatment, since if what he does proceeds from irresponsibility, it should be despised, if from irrationality, it deserves pity, and if from ill-will, it should be pardoned."