As the 2010 elections draw near, journalists have urged the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (Association of Broadcasters of the Philippines, KBP) to look into radio blocktimers, particularly those funded by political candidates and government agencies. Blocktimers are individuals who buy blocks of radio time for programs which they then market to various advertisers and interests.
As in the 2004 and 2007 elections, corruption, governance, and human rights issues should be among the lead issues in the 2010 elections. But some things make this year’s polls different from the previous elections.
Given the special nature of the 2010 elections, the media’s role as credible and critical sources of information and analysis during the election season bears watching. This year’s elections provide an opportunity to help the media plan for rational and balanced coverage: to draw out candidate views and plans on critical issues, and to promote the democratic dialogue between candidates and the voters.
by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility
COMMISSION on Human Rights Chair Leila de Lima has rightly reminded the media that Andal Ampatuan Jr., no matter how strong the evidence against him may be, still has rights, among them the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The clan that spawned him may not have accorded others the same respect, but he and his kin are nevertheless entitled to the rights, among them the right to life and to lives free from fear, they may have denied them.
Media people, some of them members of the National Press Club, waved photographs of the victims of the November 23 Maguindanao massacre in Ampatuan’s face, perhaps in the vain hope of seeing some indication of remorse from the stone faced warlord. But at least one photojournalist managed to hit him with his camera, in the process adding physical assault to the legitimate expression of media outrage.
One would hope that the camera emerged in better condition than Ampatuan, who is said to have suffered a concussion as result. But the media workers’ and journalists’ outrage was understandable. The killing of their colleagues last November 23 was not only the worst in the entire history of the mass media, it was also done with a brutality so exceptional that it defied understanding.
The ethics of journalism however, does support Chairperson de Lima’s reminder. Not only is the presumption of innocence among the principles journalists are expected to honor. They’re also expected to limit their outrage to the words that constitute the sword and shield of media practice, even as the admonition not to cause harm includes not only the imperative of minimizing harm, but a prohibition as well against physically attacking those one does not agree with.
Journalist outrage and energies are better directed towards rigorous examination of the factors that made the massacre inevitable. These factors include the system of political alliances and the institutionalization of electoral fraud that have made the coddling of warlords a continuing problem, in addition to the corruption that has doomed the areas of warlord rule to perpetual and worsening poverty. Providing the information and analysis the public needs to put the November 23 massacre in context so it may use its sovereign power to prevent future ones is a responsibility that rightly belongs to the media. It may cause harm, but only in terms of the exposure that information makes possible, rather than the physical harm that attacking anyone with a camera or any other handy piece of equipment inflicts.
This article was first published in the September-October 2009 issue of the PJR Reports.
Mr. Basorie teaches journalism at the Dr. Soetomo Press Institute (Lembaga Pers Dr. Soetomo, LPDS) in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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(The media situation in the other countries of Southeast Asia is no less complex than that in the Philippines, as the following account of a free expression case in Indonesia reveals.)
It took the mother of two under-fives to unintentionally raise a public debate on the threat to freedom of expression by a new electronic information law. Prita Mulyasari, 32, had landed in the Tangerang Women’s Correctional Facility for e-mailing a complaint to friends on Aug. 15, 2008 about the hospital service she had received. The private e-mail got into numerous mailing lists. It reached the hospital concerned and the hospital sued her for libel.
The Omni International Alam Sutra Hospital in Tangerang, Banten province, a two-hour drive West from Jakarta, filed the complaint. The police compiled a dossier. The Tangerang prosecutor’s office, using the Criminal Code and the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Act, indicted her. The Tangerang District Court found her guilty in a civil case last May 11. Officers from the prosecutor’s office picked her up at home and brought her to prison last May 13.
The author is a journalist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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The Malaysian government’s deafening silence and non-action in a recent issue involving a story on religion only reinforces public perception that it isn’t really interested in social unity and peace.
THREE YEARS ago, the Malaysian government suspended a 61-year-old English daily over a cartoon.
The Sarawak Tribune eventually closed down after drawing flak from the government when it published the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons to illustrate a story on the topic “Cartoon No Big Impact Here” on Feb. 4, 2006.
So strict is the Malaysian government that it would not let anything and anyone incite racial or religious sentiments that could make certain segments of society angry, or worse, trigger riots in this racially and religiously diverse society. In fact, the Sedition Act makes it a crime.
However, the government is now keeping quiet over an article by Al Islam, a magazine that focuses on the Muslim faith. In its May issue, the magazine ran an article on claims that the Catholic Church was converting young Muslims to Christianity.
News service Reuters made their Reuters Handbook of Journalism available online.
The handbook includes sections on Standards and Values; a Guide to Operations; a Sports Style Guide; a General Style Guide; and a Specialized Guide.
According to Reuters, they made the handbook public for reasons of transparency, service, and geography.
For more information on the contents of the handbook, please visit this blog post: For the Record (Dean Wright on Ethics, Innovation and Values).
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
A is for abattoir; Z is for ZULU: All in the Handbook of Journalism
The first entry is abattoir (not abbatoir); the last is ZULU (a term used by Western military forces to mean GMT)….
The handbook is the guidance Reuters journalists live by — and we’re proud of it. Until now, it hasn’t been freely available to the public. In the early 1990s, a printed handbook was published and in 2006 the Reuters Foundation published a relatively short PDF online that gave some basic guidance to reporters. But it’s only now that we’re putting the full handbook online….
A “right of reply” bill has been approved by the Philippine House of Representatives; a less repressive version is pending in the Philippine Senate. Nearly all Philippine media groups, including the major broadsheets and broadcast networks, are opposed to it.
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No one among those opposed to the Right of Reply bill on principle will argue that shoddy reporting doesn’t exist. There have been too many instances (in some cases involving media practitioners themselves who’re attacked by other practitioners) in which the right of reply, which responsible journalists must honor, is denied those who have been maligned in the media either through bad reporting, malicious comment, or both.
The right of reply is among the ethical principles reporters and other media practitioners, especially editors, should recognize and honor by, first of all, getting the facts right through multiple sourcing. Journalism is a discipline of verification, its very justification being accuracy first of all, which also demands fairness (presenting both or all sides) as well as balance (providing all sides in any question equal space in the case of print and equal time in the case of electronic media). Operationally, news stories try to achieve this by reporting the denial by someone accused of wrongdoing as well as the accusation. Opinion writers also need to at least provide the other side of the argument.
Statement of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) on the Right of Reply Bills
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Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr.’s sponsorship of the Senate version of the Right of Reply bill has moved some media colleagues to assume absence of malice in its intentions, although they don’t seem to have given Rep. Monico Puentevella, the main sponsor of the House version, the same credit. CMFR will not comment on the intent of either of the two bills, their consequences being far more crucial than their aims, whether these are the stated or the real ones. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, and purity of purpose does not excuse the dire consequences of uninformed legislation.
Whether we’re talking about the Senate’s version or that of the House, by compelling editors to print what they may very well not want to, the right of reply bill will undermine the editorial prerogative of deciding what to air or print that’s at the core of the exercise of press freedom in the newsroom. And yet neither bill even requires proof of the need for a reply in terms of unfair or unbalanced press treatment. It is enough that an accusation or an innuendo has been made—whether by a source or by a journalist is not even specified—for the group or individual that was the subject of a story or comment to demand time or space within 24 hours in the case of the House bill, or within three days in the case of the Senate version. It doesn’t matter how much care editors have taken to be fair by printing or airing the other side according to the professional and ethical standards of good journalism. No proof to the contrary is required, and the medium concerned must publish or air, at the risk of fines, and/or imprisonment and the cancellation of franchises, the so-called reply within the time specified by the bills.
The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) first published this report on Dec. 9, 2008.
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Excessive use of defamation and lese majeste charges by opposing political groups and authorities in Thailand to curb free expression on the Internet has forced a coalition of Internet users comprising media reformers, human rights campaigners, webmasters, bloggers, and operators of online news publications, to form a civic network called the Thai Netizens Network, designed to promote and protect cyber liberty.
The non-partisan group, officially launched on Dec. 2, was a spin-off of an earlier initiative called Freedom Against Censorship in Thailand but its mission is much broader than its predecessor’s—that is, to campaign at the national policy level to promote and protect netizens’ rights, freedom of online media as well as civic journalism, and at the same time to promote a self-regulatory framework to ensure responsible use of internet.
According to the network’s coordinator, Supinya Klangnarong, about 400 URLs have been banned over charges related to criminal defamation and lese majeste pending the court’s hearing. “The problem is that cyber-crime police find it difficult to proceed with these cases in court because they could not arrest the suspected offenders,” said Supinya.
