‘Journalism, a chancy business’

(This piece elaborates further my comment in Newsstand about an entry titled “Political Stuntism”)

“Journalism . . . is a chancy business” is a smart quip by Philippine Daily Inquirer editorialist John Nery. But depending on who is talking, it may also evoke different meanings.

Let me explain. For media owners, the business of news is business and therefore chancy. For example, a TV news program for which large investments by the owners may have been made could go awry and fail to generate the audience (the product) expected to be sold to the advertisers (the market). That makes a business venture like that “chancy”.

But the risk a professional journalist takes when writing or broadcasting to inform or to tell straight the news story is probably akin to the danger a soldier faces once dispatched to the battlefield or the hazard a professional pilot copes with as soon as his aircraft taxis on the runway. It just comes with territory, so they say.

“We are not part of the powers-that-be” is a wittier remark if, like the first one, is presented to come from “us in the media” rather than the media itself. Again, the individual journalists, like the one who shaved their heads in protest against President Arroyo’s Proclamation 1017, are easily vulnerable to intimidation (in the Philippines, the risk among journalist is statistically higher in the provinces with or without 1017); but certainly not the unsinkable Fourth Estate.

I have expressed similar distinctions before:

Journalists - the brave and principled ones, traditionally - seek out the truth (about the governors) and then try to communicate it to those who are too preoccupied to find the truth themselves. Businessmen, on the other hand, seek profits. When the outfit of journalism and of profit-making is donned by different personalities in the same entity, the result is almost always a tug of war. And whichever of the antagonists has the stronger leverage will determine whether the news enterprise will be timid or aggressive in its role as “purveyor of truth.” That is the state of mass media in general today.

I think what Oscar Wilde has written, while a bit hyperbolic, relates to the point being made here:

But at the present moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

The media “governs” in the way it creates events and frames issues on its own terms. Conditions in our midst that are not considered critical by the media or social problems that affect mainly ordinary people could be passed up for important public debate. Agenda-setting is power, an awe-inspiring one, in fact. Politicians avoid picking a fight with the media precisely because of this power and its capacity to lionize allies and demonize foes.

What’s of graver alarm however is when media power becomes a potent adjunct to other powers already possessed by the powers that be. Do we wonder why, post-martial law, business concerns controlled by some taipans have started to swallow up the ownership of major dailies in the Philippines? In an old commentary, I observed that “As new media owners, they saw the utility of the newly found power to defend their business interests from the government or rival elites while creating public awareness of matters favorable to those interests and ignoring others.” And again, even this is not as harmful as when the public mind is encroached upon in silence, for then there will be no opportunity to shave our heads and wear black armbands in protest. In a regime of liberty, we can challenge the legality of a government fiat like Proclamation 1017 or the presence of a policeman in a newsroom; but when in the name of the same liberty the assault is insidious and surreptitious like in the form of the “tight shots” of the crowd of supporters for FPJ during the presidential campaign that his wife Susan Roces has complained about (presumably to suggest a smaller assembly), often there’s no recourse.

That the “profession (of journalism) has very limited power” is open to debate. But now, do we still doubt the awesome potency of the sound bytes and the power of suggestion?