Journalists’ concerns for their safety (Part 3)

Zamboanga City—Just before departing from this iconic, Hispanic-themed city, I had the opportunity to hear several stories of journalists covering the island provinces (Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi) and the municipalities that have ratified to be part of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. It was an eye-opening experience for me to listen to them as they disclosed various ways and means to deliver the news about their respective beats. One of them joked about journalists resonating with a slogan associated with a well-known bank that says, “we find ways.”

As a former editor in chief of a regional bi-weekly tabloid published in Cotabato City in the early to mid 1990s, I found it also interesting that the same challenges of reporting the “truth” of incidents, especially violent ones that my team of reporters went through still persist up to the present—among these young and not so young (news) storytellers. Hearing these stories behind the news made me feel like going through déjà vu—although in their stories, some participants shared experiences of difficulty dealing with some trauma they have bottled up all these years.

Journalists carry several figurative items of baggage in their minds as they go to the field to cover an incident, whether it is a regular event that is happening with a certain interesting twist, or it could be a violent one, involving killings or even of massacres, sex and gender-based violence. Such figurative loads they carry include their biases about other people, their mindsets, among many others. All these mental baggage compete with each other as the reporter composes a story about an incident, with her biases snaking their way into how she reports it. A reporter’s mind is also a battleground of sorts—with her biases and worldviews clashing or resonating with each other. But more often than not, journalists’ biases manage to shape how they report their stories.

A journalist’s report, either through print or broadcast media, will be read or heard in different perspectives, and this raises the possibility of her being harassed, or worse, being threatened with death. This happens when individuals named in news reports consider the reports as an affront to their dignity as government officials, or as a means of shaming them in public.

Women journalists face even more harassment than their male counterparts do, owing to existing social structures that render women in general as objects for sex commodification. As some women journalists shared in the small conversations we had after their sessions, they experienced hearing remarks from male interviewees that are subtle ways of sexual harassment, disguised as jokes or even as compliments on how “pretty” they look. One of them said that some female journalists just brush this aside as “part of the job”—and she thinks this is a sign that sexual innuendos from their male informants have become normalized in their profession. She thinks female journalists should call out those who do these things to them immediately after hearing them, to underscore that both reporter and the one being interviewed for a report have to observe appropriate behavior and professionalism in their jobs.

But some women journalists have experienced violence while on field assignment, and these have left indelible scars of trauma that they have kept hidden in their figurative clay jars or “banga” (“tadjaw” for Cebuano-Visayans). They keep on piling up one violent experience on top of the other until such time their banga is filled to the brim. Unlike a (limitless) cornucopia, the banga has limited space for anything stored in it, and if it is filled with sharp objects, the banga can break even if it is not filled to the brim. And when it breaks, there is no way to put it back once again. Some female journalists in that workshop shared their traumatic experiences in their past that they have kept in their banga—they only went through a couple or just one painful experience in their past, but the pain was quite sharp that it was enough to break their banga down, figuratively speaking.

The workshop ended with sessions on how to address all these challenges that journalists face and it was good that they were made to go through several relaxing exercises as well as simulations of actual coverage in hypothetical dangerous situations, like covering an active conflict in war zones. The emphasis was on keeping oneself safe, even in the most challenging situations, both actual wars and mental battles that journalists have to deal with every time they witness and report a story. These underscored the need for both material and psycho-social support for journalists to carry out their mandates effectively and safely.

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