A press that is truly free is not only unburdened by state overreach, but is also ideally beyond the sway of all other powerful interests. But in a country like the Philippines—nominally democratic but still plagued by extreme inequities in practically all aspects of society—the demarcation between the public orientation of the mainstream media and the private interests of its owners has never been clearly drawn.
This is all the more apparent under the Duterte administration, as personal and political vendettas, in addition to the ever-present attempts at stifling critical reportage, fuel the state’s systematic assault against the free press.
The elite owners of the media establishment, most notably the Lopez and Prieto families, have been on the receiving end of the president’s trademark tirades for supposedly “embarrassing” his administration—and the consequences for the Philippine media landscape have been far-reaching. ABS-CBN was notoriously shut down, and the Prieto family’s controlling stake in the Inquirer group was bought out by Ramon Ang, a close Duterte ally.
“Media ownership has always been the Achilles heel of press freedom in the Philippines,” said Columbia University Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism Director Sheila Coronel in an interview with ANC’s Matters of Fact. “Media owners have other business interests. They do not want to upset any regime, not just Duterte. They do not want to upset the powers that be because they fear that their businesses will not thrive or that there will be vendetta against their businesses if they become too critical.”
Despite its once widely touted branding as the freest press in Asia, the mainstream media landscape in the Philippines has been consistently held captive by the economic and political elite as part of their vast business empires. In its latest media ownership report, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) flagged the extreme concentration of media ownership in the Philippines in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and families.
Billionaire businessman Manuel Pangilinan is perhaps the most illustrative example of this over-concentration. Based on the RSF report, Pangilinan owns a sizable portion of all media sectors through his MediaQuest Holdings. This is in addition to his ownership of telecommunication giants PLDT and Smart.
The problem, as Coronel pointed out, is when these wealthy business owners invariably choose to prioritize the security of their businesses over that of preserving the independence of their media outfits. In these instances, self-censorship is not merely done on an individual level but on the entire media company to avoid earning the ire of the ruling government.
In a bombshell Rappler report, it was revealed that Inquirer editors were routinely asked by the publication’s owners “if certain stories were really necessary” and flat out admitted they were practicing self-censorship in an attempt to pacify the administration’s persecution of the Prieto family.
“It’s not just journalists, but it’s media owners, and media owners convey these messages in subtle or not so subtle ways down the line. So even if journalists are courageous, even if they say, ‘I want to do my job,’ they cannot, because the media owners are not able to stand up for them or are not willing to stand up to the government,” Coronel said.
What happened to ABS-CBN is a cautionary tale for all outfits. It was a blitzkrieg attack at the very heart of the media establishment, and the message was clear as day: Toe the line of the administration or else. “Or else” has morphed into an ominous arsenal for all sorts of attacks ranging from expletive-laden public callouts from the president to more sinister ones like state-sponsored trolling and malicious prosecution.
An unmistakable climate of fear in levels never before seen since the Marcos years, remarked Coronel, is choking the country’s press. “I have not sensed so much fear and so much caution in the last 30 years as I have seen now—and it’s not surprising,” she said. “If the biggest TV network is closed down because of its reporting or because of personal vendetta, how are the other proprietors supposed to think?”
Due in large to their established clout and capital, media barons often default to the mindset that the next administration will be more amiable to them, so more often than not, they just try to weather a hostile regime—because they can afford to do so—and temper their outfit’s reportage in the process. In this case, public interest is the main casualty, as it so often is when the elite scuffle for wealth and power.
Normalizing this level of fear and self-censorship from the press has disastrous impacts on democracy and the country’s future as a whole. Seeing how threats, intimidation, and outright suppression work effectively in taming the press to be more pliant, as Coronel noted, will embolden future administrations to do the same, practically easing the transition from one tyrannical regime to another.
Extricating business interests from the press, then, is a crucial step in ensuring the resiliency of the fourth estate from attacks against the state, which are sure to come in any society with a media landscape capable of being adversarial to the powers that be—the acid test of genuine democracy.
However, the lack of a viable alternative to the current corporatized structure of the Philippine media is the primary hurdle in attaining a genuinely free press. All attempts toward editorial independence through a taxpayer-funded outfit, similar to BBC, have fallen through since the first Aquino administration, noted journalism scholar Luis Teodoro, due in large to the lack of interest from both the public and the state, along with the iron grip of corporations over the industry.
A well-informed public is essential to any functioning democracy. It becomes even more so in times of crisis. So must media ownership, like fire from Mount Olympus, be seized from the ruling elite and brought down to the masses where it can be of greater service. ●
