By Vergel O. Santos[1]

Here is an adaptation from a talk given by Vergel O. Santos, publisher and chairman of the editorial board of BusinessWorld and vice-chairman of the Philippine Press Institute during the Media Nation. This serves as an introduction to the theme of the PPI’s 16th National Press Forum on “Media Accountability and Public Engagement” on April 23 to 25, 2012 at the Traders Hotel Manila.

I have scarcely observed the media allowing that deficiencies of their own may have contributed to the enmity, not to mention the violence, they have recently been attracting. Unsurprisingly, the point is labored and exaggerated to ridiculous criminal proportions by the other side – if not from among the perpetrators of the violence themselves (for whom running and hiding or playing dumb once caught would seem the best option, judging by the lopsided majority among them who have managed to get away), then from among their tactical allies, the media’s natural adversaries – the very people who deserve to be watched for the great wrong they can do given the great power they possess, power deriving from wealth or office; they who might just be too happy to see the counter-power of the media, the watchdog set on them, eroded.

I suppose such adversarial division as has existed between the media and their subjects in a society so unequal as ours could only have bred a progressive sense of mutual suspicion. But for suspicion to be acted on with violence, let alone with murder, is simply cold-blooded, and to try to justify it as having been provoked by the worst words said, simply perverse. No amount or force of offensive vocabulary deserves to be replied to with violence. In the democratic deal we have bought into, words are made available to everyone as a weapon precisely to keep disputes non-violent. Of course, illegal transgressions may yet be committed verbally, in which case the courts step in to undertake the final instance of democratic management.

But why at all push freedom to that point? A truly responsible journalist, in my view, does not go so far: as a matter of course, he does not risk being taken to court; he avoids it and only takes the risk when holding back might cause a critical setback to his sworn cause – the public interest. But then, again, how does a journalist attain the discernment that makes for responsible practice? Is there in fact enough discernment of that quality to go around for our journalism to deserve to be rated “responsible?”

I’m afraid these are the very questions the media have tried to avoid and now continue to avoid, ever more determinedly, and I sense two reasons: first, they have no confident answers; second, they won’t allow anything – worst of all self-criticism – that might tend to undermine their position and, conversely, reinforce their adversaries’ own.

I do understand, but in no circumstances may professional standards be chucked for fraternal solidarity. Indeed, the standards that govern any professional practice necessarily also define the fraternal lines within it, of which the basic one separates the responsible from the irresponsible.

What is journalism?

But before we get ahead of ourselves and begin looking where that line may lie in our own profession, let’s ask ourselves what is journalism really about, and how we came to deserve – if we believe we in fact did – to be in it.
A journalist who is also an iconoclastic intellectual recalls his reaction to arrangements made for him to meet one “Professor of Journalism”[2]:
Surely this was a mistake or a misprint? Journalism was a state of mind: itwasn’t the sort of thing that could be taught, or in which one could get an academic qualification.

I must, in fairness, alert you to the tense used here: the definite past. Our detractor may have changed his mind after his actual meeting with the “professor,” which is the vague sense I get; anyway, I’m not presuming anything. Still I’m prepared to go along with him, but, again, only to an extent – to the extent that journalism can be taught partially, but that until it becomes a state of mind it could not have been learned fully.

At any rate, journalism is part academic and part craft. It is philosophies, mathematics, histories and cultures, politics and economics, and arts and sciences supplied in amounts enough to provide a beginner journalist with a general working perspective, one informed not only by the standard liberal-arts disciplines, but also by studies in professional ethics; also, journalism is words handled with some degree of perspicuity – accuracy of description, clarity of thought, leanness of language, and a manner of expression decent yet straightforward.

Both parts surely can be learned in school, but only if properly delineated, that is, taught separately and by different methods, one taught in a classroom as a regular undergraduate course, the other taught in a laboratory as a practical post-graduate course, one learned by doing.

In fact, from then on everything is learned mostly by doing, learned on the job, although a return to academe, or any semi-academic setting (lectures, seminars, and similar short programs), should be useful for specialist or otherwise higher learning.
I’ve often wondered who actually have had the benefit of that sort of grounding, and don’t feel sanguine ­– how can I, with the proliferation of superficial and sensationalist publications and broadcast programs and more recently the opening of on-line platforms to everyone?

It seems to me that the media have sunk into a free-for-all business – more individualistic than organized, turning out products untouched by professional standards – and that true journalism has become a mere shadow within it. In this new disarrangement, citizen journalism is the phrase of currency, one that cheapens a once noble and discriminating vocation by suggesting that anyone – just anyone – can take it up.

That is just the sort of fraudulence that breeds wrongful ineptitude, which, although, again, never deserving to be met with violence, is, all the same, a crime – indeed, a wholesale crime.

[1]Vergel O. Santos is the publisher and editorial-board chairman of BusinessWorldand the vice-chairman of the Philippine Press Institute. His piece is an adaptation from a talk he gave in September 2011 in Cebu City, at the yearly Media Nation forum.
[2]Christopher Hitchens, a British-born naturalized American, writing in Hitch 22: a memoir (Twelve, Hachette Book Group, New York, 2010). The professor was Penn Kimball of Columbia University.