Luis V. Teodoro » More Engaged Than Critical

But what’s worse than its superfluity is that any such protocol can lead to tying the hands of journalists even further– even beyond the police assumption that journalists can be arrested for obstruction of justice merely by covering an event of public interest. The police are likely to interpret the terms of such a protocol in favor of restricting coverage, even as journalists will interpret them in the context of their responsibility to get the news and disseminate it.

Such a protocol will thus serve no purpose, and will certainly not avoid future conflicts, given the police and government mindset of hostility towards the press despite the protection given it by the Constitution.

But as noted earlier, it is totally expected of the police, given their authoritarian mindset, to blame the arrested journalists for what happened last November 29, as well as to shift the burden of preventing similar incidents from themselves to the press. What I did not expect was some journalists’ and academics’ doing the same.

A forum on the November 29 incident held last week at the University of the Philippines in which three journalists spoke did precisely that. One panelist argued for the media’s “critical engagement” with government, describing the adversarial relationship between media and government as “an old paradigm.”

As old a paradigm as the adversarial relationship may be, it is eminently suited to a situation in which the government conceals and distorts information while journalists take the greatest pains to get it and to distinguish fact from government spin and fiction.

But “critical engagement” is itself not new either. It was at the core of the Marcos dictatorship’s efforts to coopt the press into collaborating with it, the terms of that collaboration being as simple as they were destructive to public interest: the media were to be partners of government, and were to eschew reporting “bad” (meaning unfavorable to government) news.

Of course such an engagement is always possible. But it is also extremely dangerous not only for press freedom but for whatever remains of democracy in the country of our sorrows, given the context in which journalists have had to function during the Arroyo regime. That context has been characterized by a constant, unrelenting assault on press freedom, of which the November 29th arrests were only one incident, and which were in fact followed immediately by the threat of further journalists’ arrests for merely being physically present in similar situations.

The fundamental condition for any engagement with any government is the latter’s prior and unconditional recognition that press freedom is under Constitutional protection because it is a freedom superior to that of the police’s duty to arrest wrong-doers. That recognition is notably absent in the present regime, with its concern for survival, period.

Journalists will do well to recall the context in which some of them would argue in favor of “critical engagement.” In addition to the November 29 arrests, that context has also included an unprecedented number of journalists killed, libel suits filed, journalists imprisoned, broadcast networks threatened, films censored, and journalists threatened with sedition charges. “Critical engagement” today, as it was during the Marcos period, will mean more engagement rather than less, and less of the critical part rather than more.