Meryl Streep and Digong
One doesn’t usually expect an actress—even a legendary award-winning performer like Meryl Streep—to champion press freedom and call out the president-elect of the United States.
But that Streep did in her speech following her acceptance of the Cecil B. De Mille award for lifetime achievement at yesterday’s Golden Globes Awards. She even made a humorous reference to the group behind this annual gathering that kicks off Hollywood’s awards season. Addressing those gathered in the ballroom, Streep declared: “You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.”
After singling out fellow actors on stage (Viola Davis, who introduced her) and in the audience who were all born in places far away from Hollywood but have become mainstays or fast-rising stars in the Hollywood firmament, Streep homed in on the main subject of her critical speech, the “man she would not name.”
“There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth,” Streep said. “It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”
This “instinct to humiliate,” said the award-winning actress, “when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful,” has its larger implications, because “it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
At this point, Streep brought up the social and political value of a free press, declaring that “we need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.” She called on everyone—including, I’m sure, the global audience of millions watching the awards night—to join her in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists “because we’re going to need them going forward. And they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”
Many Filipinos, if I may speculate, and judging from comments on my FB feed, may have felt the sting of Streep’s words, especially at how our homegrown leader has used his own public platform to bully and humiliate those who’ve crossed him and who he perceives to be hatching “ouster” plots against him.
At this point, I wonder how the President’s spokespersons, including Presidential Communications Office chief Martin Andanar, will refract the harsh glare of Streep’s implied criticisms.
To be fair, in the first six months of his term, Andanar has managed to put some order and fairness in the way the government communicates with its larger public. The PCO managed to shepherd an executive order (in the absence of a law) on freedom of information that, however, covers only the executive branch. There is also the creation of the Presidential Task Force on Media Security, which faces its first challenge with the killing of a broadcaster and university professor in Ilocos Sur.
The former TV anchorman has also tried to streamline, as he explained shortly after he took office, the operations of the different government information offices, including PTV-4, the Bureau of Broadcast, and the Philippine News Agency.
But for every step Andanar and the government machinery he heads takes to rationalize communications operations, his biggest problem remains the President, from whose mouth emanates much of the “miscommunication.”
It may be too much to expect Andanar and his fellow officials in charge of communications in Malacañang to start schooling Mr. Duterte on choosing his words and refraining from making unnecessary enemies. For that, the President must realize the folly of his words, or else learn to live with the annoyances of what Meryl Streep called “the principled press.”
