Media should reverse decline in public trust, confidence

The JOY (Journalists of the Year) awardees this year, courageous and responsible journalists Nancy Carvajal, Howie Severino, and Marites Vitug—the news outfits they represent already household names just as they are—truly deserve the hard-earned recognition.

With JOY, a noble, once-a-year project of Metrobank, fearless “truth-telling” now gets tangible rewards. JOY and this year’s awardees underscore in our national consciousness the Priority Development Assistance Fund, actually a bad habit tolerated for decades but finally scrapped by the Supreme Court halfway President Aquino’s six-year term; the 2013 police rubout in Atimonan, Quezon; the 1999 Inquirer advertisement boycott; the 350-hectare hacienda in Rosario, Batangas, etc. We have not missed a series!

Indeed, to us newspaper readers, TV viewers and, possibly, radio listeners, JOY illustrates the necessity of reporting events and issues of public interest as the guiding principle in journalism. Indeed, the “underprivileged” in the “DE” deserve to know and understand these events and issues just as those in the “ABC” readership.

JOY comes at a time when public trust and confidence in mass media are taking a hit not only in Metro Manila but also in other countries.

In the United States, the Gallup poll conducted last Sept. 9-13 showed that trust and confidence in newspaper, TV and radio reporting was 40 percent, down from 68 percent in May 1972. On the other hand, the percentage of those who regard traditional mass media with “‘None at all’ trust” went up from

6 percent in 1972 to 24 percent in 2015 (“Who’d be a journalist,” New York Times, 10/20/15). Mass media in this part of the world, which is more “western” than the West’s, could be in the same predicament.

But we trust the Inquirer, GMA Network Inc., Rappler and the other media outfits to take the lead, as always, in reversing or arresting this perceived or imagined decline in readers’ trust and confidence in their kind.

—MANUEL Q. BONDAD, Barangay Palanan, Makati City