We look back at 2013 with sorrow and look forward to the new year with hope, yet justifiably worried that the bloodshed and impunity, apathy and hostility that riddled the year we left behind will be much more this year.
It is, indeed, difficult to hope that the culture of impunity, under which many of our colleagues have been killed, assaulted, threatened and harassed, would end soon; or that things would improve a bit under an administration that brushes off media killings in one of the deadliest years for the Philippine press—at least 10 killed, the last three within two weeks—as “not so serious.”
Or under a President who has fallen into the habit of whining about media’s “negativism” whenever his administration falls flat on its face as he did in the wake of Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” lumping the media coverage of that disaster with those in Zamboanga and Bohol when, in fact, reportage on the two previous disasters was generally sympathetic.
All this as government continues to remain apathetic to calls for the passage of laws that would expand the boundaries of the freedoms of the press and expression, such as the laws on the freedom of information and on the decriminalization of libel.
And, of course, we mourn our colleagues who lost their lives delivering information to their audiences even as the supertyphoon unleashed deadly storm surges on Tacloban City.
Despite all this, we do have reason to hope, not least of all because of the Philippine journalism community’s steadfast commitment to uphold the principles of the profession, notwithstanding the continuing attempts to stifle us and portray us as a bane that ought to be stamped out.
We have seen how our community quickly banded together to aid those among us who felt the lash of Yolanda.
Yes, as we have said again and again, the Philippine press remains free because Filipino journalists keep it free. But we still have our work cut out for us. We still urgently need to reconnect with our audiences, with our people, to help lift them from the state of apathy and ignorance in which deliberate malgovernance has kept them for generations. We need to make them realize that our collective search for genuine justice and freedom as a people, as a nation, can never succeed without a truly free press that serves both as foil to official abuse and as a source of information with which they, we, can build the future we deserve.
Media practitioners owe this to the people, much as we owe this to ourselves. For without the people, we can never survive.
To a better, brighter future. Happy New Year!
—ROWENA C. PARAAN,
chair, National Union of Journalists of the Philippines