MY FATHER is a constant cynic when it comes to media personnel. It hurts me, because primarily, I work with and for media-although indirectly. I teach Media Studies in a university. My students-should they persevere in their respective disciplines-will be our journalists and/or broadcasters a few years hence. But I very well understand my father, his experiences with the media hollering around to get his views and to extract information from him in his capacity as one of the chiefs of our state railway agency were frequented with disappointments like interview answers edited to fit the taste of the person covering the beat (the term ideologies can never be applied, the use of it would be an insult to the word itself). The essential truth is that this is never new to us. The more alarming thing is that all through these recent years, this phenomenon has already desensitized, disillusioned, brainwashed, mis-educated us.
I have a daunting task in hauling broadcasting majors from believing that political figures need the media for publicity. As a pedagogue of Media Studies, I am deeply troubled by this; although never really surprised. Over the radio one evening, I heard a commentator arrogantly asked a field reporter to search for certain Camarines Sur board member so that they could ask him questions, subsequently telling the field reporter that the politician in question needs the media nowadays, in the advent of the 2010 elections. What more?
My lecture today is more experiential than theoretical or demographic. It is more of a tale, a narrative, than a presentation of figures and survey results. Perhaps, it is what we need these times; during this epoch of surveys that are self-serving, a period when demographic profiles and statistical data end up in just being figures and data themselves and nothing else, not even a tinge of action that research findings necessitate. Consider how the public ignores political surveys; consider how we disregard these supposedly social response indicators, simply because we believe either they are tampered or are done to favor one entity over the others. To the commoner, these demographics are never an authentic determinant of the public desire.
What I have today is a tale that embodies my own critique-or perhaps, censure-of, over, and about the state of our media industry today-particularly our local media here in Bicol. I am here in a two-fold persona: that of an advocate, and that of a pedagogue, a teacher. This fact, maybe, is the scope and limit of my lecture and public sharing. I believe that here in our midst, the booth is a marketplace. That supposed sacred space of media practitioners, especially, our broadcasters is more often than not, violated by their own kind and their cohorts. The booth, that small glass-lined, sound-proof cube consisted of a broadcast console, a swivel chair, and a condenser microphone, may also be a place of merchandise, where information are curbed in exchange of something, cash or kind.
All be it that this is a pressing concern, pun intended, there is nothing new in the issue of media corruption. Chay Hofileña of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism a few years ago came out with the book, "News for Sale" that presented an extensive research on the corruption of media in the Philippines and how politicians-our supposed leaders-have managed and succeeded in debauching the press. Funny, though never we should actually be, that new terminologies and term definitions came out of this shameful phenomenon in our media. Unfortunately, I happened to have witnessed one here in Naga City, where cash payments to media personnel covering a particular beat were distributed from a u-box of a motorcycle. How nasty the process was. In my eyes, how money-hungry our press was during that time. But can we actually blame this on the poor field reporter assigned? The answer may just be another chicken-and-egg tale. One newspaperman, a senior one, told me he got ten thousand from that event. That was supposedly for a good news out of a really, really bad and shameful failure of an ambitious and not well-researched implementation of a state project. The next day, the newspaperman was by-lined in a news article on a failed project in a national daily. That evening he invited all the radiomen and they all had a drinking spree out of the ten thousand pesos issued to him by the manager of the state agency. Our broadcast industry has lots more tales to share.
Vic Nierva blogs at http://aponihandiong.blogspot.com and supports the advocacy of http://lupikontradam.tk.