Unsettled ‘IOU’

“Media Accountability and Public Engagement” is the theme 76 newspapers will discuss at the Philippine Press Institute’s annual meeting on Monday. Harsh facts underpin the antiseptic captions.

President Aquino will keynote this two-day meeting. He quit waffling and endorsed the Freedom of Information bill. That should buff up his bona fides. Discussions will then hopscotch from an “Asian Media Barometer” to “Reporting the Environment.”

These debates are possible because “journalists of a tougher mold” fought suppressors. Joaquin “Chino” Roces, Teodoro Locsin Sr. and Jose Burgos Jr. were imprisoned and their papers padlocked before People Power I smashed Marcos’ shackles. The Inquirer didn’t buckle when President Joseph Estrada tried to gut its advertising base.

The press “basks complacently in liberties that earlier generations fought for,” notes a Cebu Press Freedom Week editorial. “We drink from cisterns we never built. And we reap from vineyards we never planted.”

Journalists still have to settle this IOU. The only acceptable currency is unflagging dedication to daily truth seeking. There must be “quiet recommitment, by all, to this fountainhead of other liberties.” Nunca mas. Never again.

This is a gruelling task, given past betrayals. Under Proclamation 1081, journalists most vociferous in proclaiming liberty of expression morphed into the harshest martial law censors.

“Whenever freedom of the press has been permitted, Filipinos defended it with passion,” David Rosenberg writes in “Marcos and Martial Law” (Cornell University). “Whenever it has been prohibited, they complied with government regulation with obsequiousness.”

We’re hobbled by truncated memories. Eight out of 10 students barely recall the late former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. Or why he was gunned down. This is also a society of embedded impunity.

Last Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York published its 2012 survey. A dysfunctional justice system wedges the Philippines third among the four nations that fail to nail journalist murderers. Iraq, Somalia and Sri Lanka are our fellow “black sheep.”

Newspapers, broadcast stations and institutions reemerged into a post-martial law world altered by the Internet. First conceptualized at the 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence conference, the Net spun off into cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, iPads, etc.

An original 16 million signed up for the Net at the start. By June 2011, over 2.16 billion were “wired.” Cell phones debuted in the mid-1990s. Over 5.28 billion hefted a cell phone by late 2011. Of these, 86 million were Filipinos.

In 2001, Filipinos were the first to wage revolution with cell phones, Howard Rheingold writes in “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.” They “provided the first real test of text messaging” to oust Joseph Estrada.

The Lebanese cloned Filipino tactics to whip up “Cedar Revolution” rallies that “resembled Edsa’s human waves,” reported the Christian Science Monitor. Today, cameras in cell phones document the massacre of demonstrators in Syria by Bashar al-Assad’s troops despite a wobbly UN ceasefire.

“The public used to consume news like sucking on a straw,” recalls Richard Posner in his book “Bad News.” He adds: “Now it’s being sprayed like a firehose.” The new media’s vast reach and millisecond speed whets assertion. Paradoxically, they spur demands for even more verification.

“Every new medium begins as a container for the old,” communications guru Marshall McLuhan wrote. This resonates in a sideline debate: Will print go the way of the dinosaur? For now, recall the ancient axiom: Verba volant. Scripta anent. (Words vanish. The written word endures.)

Focus instead on the more festering issues. The Internet, cell phone and Facebook move truth—or falsehood—at “warp speed.” A scoop once stood until the next edition. Today, it lasts until the next 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.”

Remember the bogus psychological profiles on then presidential candidate Benigno Aquino III? Election campaigner Guido Delgado peddled them at a press conference. Pressed for evidence, he bristled. “It’s the job of the press to verify.”

“In practice, the lowest editorial standards tend to drive out the higher,” notes a Pew Foundation study. “It creates a kind of Gresham’s Law of Journalism.” Assertion converts the press “into a conduit of politics as cultural civil war.” Reliance on polarized argument spreads.

“Verifying facts is the central function of journalism,” the late Bill Kovach drilled into Nieman fellows at Harvard University. “The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification. That holds for a network TV news division or a lone citizen blogging on the Internet.”

“At work today is a new culture of impatient journalism. [It is] not dedicated to establishing whether a story is true. Instead we’re moving toward a journalism of assertion. And the cost to society is high.”

“In my 11 years in broadcasting, I’ve noticed only a handful of reporters taking advantage of ‘deep background sessions,’” ABS-CBN’s Lynda Jumilla writes in Philippine Journalism Review. The need is for more reporting of significance, adds Jumilla, who covers the Chief Justice’s impeachment trial.

“Evolution of the Web has raised the bar,” Google’s Richard Gingras writes. “The future of journalism can … be better than its past. But this will only be the case to the extent that all of us work to make it so.”

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