Pivotal concern

Is media today wedged into the outer side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”?

“The what?” blurted Cebu’s Press Freedom Week pooled editorial Monday.

Every third week of September, the Cebu media tamp down fierce competition. Instead, they mark together how martial law shackled freedom of expression in 1972. In Cagayan de Oro and  Dumaguete, the press holds similar, though shorter, remembrance rites in May.

“Remembering with undiminished intensity, over time, need not make us curators of our ancestors’ grievances,” columnist Ellen Goodman insisted. “We can honor the past, without being trapped in it.”

Most of today’s youngsters have hazy notions of the Marcos dictatorship, surveys confirm. These children will wield  power tomorrow. Yet, their insight into what People Power wrested back is tenuous. So is the sense of stewardship.

Cebu’s 2011 program, thus, includes conferences for mass communication students, films and roundtables on professional issues. JV Rufino of Inquirer Mobile led a session on  “Where is Journalism in a Digital World?”

Memory is both treasury and guardian. “It is right that media recall how Proclamation 1081 suspended human rights, padlocked Congress, censored the press and co-opted many,” Cebu’s new Archbishop Jose Palma told journalists after their traditional Press Freedom Walk.

“Some of you were in kindergarten on Feb. 13,1986,” Palma recalled. “The Catholic Bishops’ Conference (then) issued a pastoral letter, declaring the snap elections as fraudulent. Speaking  the truth helped to spark People Power 1. Filipinos were the first to wage non-violent revolution, with cell phones for People Power 2 in 2001.”

“There are two freedoms,” Palma added. The false, where a man is free to do what he likes. And the true, where man is at liberty to do what he ought. Today’s cyberspace revolution made that task more complex. In Filipino homes today, average time weekly spent trawling the Internet has doubled.

Is this the other side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”? Over two millennia of press history are compressed by scientists into this bracket.

On this “Parenthesis’” earlier side is the  world’s  first-ever “newspaper”: the 35-meter “Trajan’s Column” in Rome. Completed in 113 B.C., the tower depicts in bas relief Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian wars. This was “an  incredibly expensive way to publish a story.”

For centuries thereafter, news was passed on orally. Scribes wrote letters and books by hand.

Until the year 1436. Using an 800-guilder loan, Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, invented a machine that used moveable wooden letters. Books and newspapers proliferated over the next six centuries. This launched the “Print Revolution.” It forms the core of “Gutenberg Parenthesis.”

Ferdinand Marcos padlocked newspaper offices and broadcast stations in 1972. “Slavery was the price tag for democratic survival, Marcos told us that fateful night,” the first Press Week editorial recalled. “Salvage victims and corruption … were the penalty exacted by propagandists who masqueraded as journalists… Never again revisiting enforced ‘unanimity of the graveyard’ is essential….”

Yet, even as Marcos gagged the mainline press, the “Digital Revolution” uncoiled. The first inter-person communication on the Internet occurred in 1971. Fax and cell phones followed. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolt harnessed new technology. In London’s 2011 riots, looters deployed  Blackberrys to dodge police.

No regime today can confiscate 78 million cell phones that Filipinos have. There are 168.2 million Indonesian cell phone owners. About 29.7 million Filipinos are wired into the Net. Chinese censors “firewall” their 477.8 million Internet clients.

“Decades 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 fire hose.”

Today, 24/7 news is the rule. Twitter, Facebook, iPads, etc. stoke the uncertain Arab Spring. All can have their say on the cyberspace expressway. Many do so, often with little cross-checking, or ethical concern. “Everyone is entitled to his opinion,” the late US Sen. Pat Moynihan groused. “But not everyone can have his own set of facts.”

The new technology radically recasts journalism’s tools. Electronics whittled away, to cite one example, the traditional face-to-face oversight that editors exercised over reporters. There are few gate keepers left.

This is the “Global Village” that Marshall McLuhan foresaw. It unfolds in a country where the needy—over 27 million at last count—are peddled for a pair of sandals. “The greatest threat are journalists who act as megaphones for the powerful.”

The new media today can move truth—or falsehood—with the click of a mouse. “News organizations are abandoning the race to be the first to break the news,” the Economist notes. “[They’re] focusing instead on being the best at verifying.”

Beyond the “Gutenberg Parenthesis,” confirming truth emerges as the pivotal concern in tomorrow’s journalism. Then and now, the journalist’s first obligation is to the truth. That is the bottom line for Press Freedom Week 2011.

“Babel is the ancient image of conflicting views with scant regard for truth,” Palma said. “But the Truth shall make you free. Truth spelt with a capital T.”

(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)