Why Brian Gorrell Story Is Not Fit to Print

By Luis V. Teodoro

Although it’s supposed to be the talk of the town, and getting 36,000 visits a day not only from Netizens from the Philippines but also from other countries, the Brian Gorrell blog and the controversy surrounding it has only been reluctantly covered by the Philippine media.

For those whose interest has been focused on the rice crisis, hunger, unemployment, several economists’ doubts over the alleged 7.3 per cent growth of the economy last quarter, the National Broadband Network scandal, China-Philippine relations, the Spratlys, and other issues too many bloggers would sniff at as less than earth-shaking, the blog came online in furtherance of Gorrell’s campaign to get back US$70,000 that he claims was swindled off him by an ex boyfriend who’s allegedly a member of Manila high society, and whose associates cover its doings as lifestyle page “journalists”.

Among other claims, Gorrell has written that what he calls the “Gucci Gang” are free-loading, drug-snorting, pretentious brutes and bitches–parasites who live off the freebies and handouts of such PR events as the launch of this or that product line for socialites (and such other pretenders to the title as the pretty actress-whores kept by Manila’s aging but rich Lotharios) and the rest of that crowd.

It’s not an unfair picture of Manila high society, it being the domain as well of the low. But it’s the truth of Gorrell’s charges against his alleged ex-lover and his cohort that’s yet to be established. Primarily we only have his word for it via his blog, and while he has allowed one of those he has attacked in it some space, a blog is by its very nature self-serving, and the instrument of whoever created it.

That a blog is neither newspaper nor broadcast station seems obvious, but it’s a fact that’s nevertheless often missed, especially by those bloggers who’ve only recently discovered–and misconstrued—the miracles of free expression.

A blog provides those who would otherwise have no other way of venting their spleen the means to inflict their opinions no matter how putrid on whoever chances upon it or is directed to it in cyberspace. While there’s no shortage of bloggers who’re also journalists so steeped in the professional and ethical standards of journalism they don’t release anything into cyberspace that they haven’t verified, legions more hardly know the difference between gossip and fact, and don’t care to find out.

That’s not all. Any idiot with a desk or lap top and an Internet connection can start a blog. He or she decides when it goes up, what goes into it, who gets to comment in it, and how long it stays up. A blog is a distinctly individual thing, unlike the collective undertaking a newspaper or a news broadcast is, in both of which there are editors and a desk whose job is to look for errors in fact, correct bad grammar, and yes, check for libelous remarks.

It’s true that some newspapers and news broadcasts seem to be run by idiots too, and have been either printed or aired by people who’re just like most bloggers–i.e., they haven’t had a single day’s training in what they’re claiming to be doing, which is journalism. There’s this difference, however: responsible, professional journalists know the latter for what they are, and have about the same attitude towards them as doctors have toward quacks, which is to say that they don’t hold them up as exemplars of the profession, whereas most bloggers don’t make that distinction among themselves.

As for libel, (non-journalist) bloggers have been known to sneer at journalists’ concern for it, dismissing it as a concession to censorship. It can be. But while the libel law has been used to intimidate journalists, and Filipino journalists lost the most famous case in this country–the Aves de Rapina case–through a court biased for an official of the US colonial regime, it does have the eminently valid purpose of protecting media subjects from the abuse of the overzealous and/or malicious.

Not that journalists have not risked libel suits–if the stakes are high enough. Some indeed have braved prison and even death, both during the martial law period as well as the present regime, which at various times has threatened journalists with inciting to sedition cases and the withdrawal of network franchises, as well as listed them as “enemies of the state”.

Many have indeed died, 90 percent of the community journalists who have been killed in this country since 2001 for exposing corruption and criminality. Scared most journalists aren’t. But it’s a rare blogger who’d knowingly take the same risks while shooting his mouth off.