PRESS FREEDOM AND THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

By Raul L. Locsin
Presented at the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Forum,

Ramon Magsaysay Center, Manila, 1 September 1999

I find this an opportune moment to make some observations in the light of recent events which influence the milieu in which we journalists earn a living.

Over the past months, there have been a lot of harsh exchanges on the role of the press in a democratic society such as ours. The press has charged the presidency and its cohorts with attempting to nibble at the sanctity of the freedom of expression as provided for in the Constitution. On the other hand, the presidency claims its rights to be free to express its own disenchantment with the press and accuses the press of being less than professional in its conduct.

That such a conflict should be there is rightly so and a healthy sign. The press in democratic societies is not part of government but serves as a check and balance against those that the citizens have voted into power. However, to be more effective as a gadfly the press must also exercise the best of its professionalism. And certainly a government that has sworn to uphold the laws of the land, is going beyond bounds when it tries to intimidate the media.

The body of laws which strengthens the hands of the government is the same as that which guarantees those other rights of the citizen which the state has forsworn to uphold, the same citizen from whom government derives its very existence.

We are no strangers to a free press. But in such an unfettered milieu, the exercise lies more in distinguishing between freedom of expression and license, between style and bias, between the news and an opinion.

In such an environment, everybody is free to set up any publication. Its size and circulation depend largely on one’s wallet; and its quality is determined by one’s skill and/or inclination.

Thus, one has seen a proliferation of assorted publications of multiple persuasions dying or surviving on the disapproval or acceptance of the reading public.

Even if vested interests own most newspapers, at least the plurality of interests affords a multiplicity of viewpoints in a free marketplace of ideas.

There have been accusations leveled at the press that it cares less about public service than making money.

This may be so, but on the other hand, a newspaper is also a business and if it does not make money it cannot ideally function as efficiently and as professionally as one that does.

If it does not make money then it has to be subsidized as has happened in many instances. If it is subsidized, then it owes loyalty to that subsidy.

If a newspaper makes money then it is self-sufficient and owes no loyalty to anybody but itself. It achieves independence up to the degree that its owners want to exercise their commitment to inform the public freely without fear or favor.

Freedom of the press and expression in the Philippines is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in her Constitution by a provision not unlike that in the First Amendment of the American Charter from where the Philippine organic law drew a lot of its substance during the establishment of what was then the Philippine Commonwealth.

Subsequent amendments to our organic law may have altered our political structures but have kept intact the intent of the provision on press freedom which makes the press in this country the only organized business accorded constitutional protection.

In spite of this, to paraphrase, eternal vigilance is still the price of liberty. It was not too long ago, during the Marcos regime, that lack of vigilance deluded us, as a nation, into thinking that a temporary surrender of our civil rights, among them the freedom of the press, was essential to the myth of national interest that would-be dictators use as a lure to the citizen.

For the nine years of martial law the Philippine press exercised self-censorship as its contribution to the call for national development, mostly out of fear, oftentimes by acquiescence. Unwittingly thus, it helped allow a political regime to perpetuate the fiction that it was preempting a revolution to “correct the inequities and injustices spawned by the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a feudal few, defuse anarchy in the streets and provide food, clothing, shelter, and economic well-being to every man, woman and child in a new society.