At the competitions taking place across the country before the National Schools Press Conference in Vigan this year, speakers on stage thresh out the usual talking points: the value of public service, speaking truth to power, keeping the spirit of campus journalism alive, and the like.
It is hard to fault young journalists for chasing a dream promised to them by a program that had long defined the campus journalist experience with laurels in a setting not representative of actual on-the-ground practice. But once they leave the contest rooms, they have to return to a place where these platitudes are contradicted.
Student media at the basic education level has been subjected for too long to institutional overreach, which has robbed it of its autonomy and left it unable to report critically on issues affecting their communities.
Campus journalists have been strung along by contest journalism, which places a premium on form over substance. The nature of the contest format that the Department of Education chooses to promote has trained contestants to conform to the personal arbitrary preferences of judges rather than compete on their own merits—a trend which has even extended to school papers themselves.
High school publications have thus been forced to play it safe, in hopes that the accolades from these competitions will bring in attention and support to their operations that would otherwise be underfunded by self-interested school administrations.
Schools are not exempt from issues of student safety and institutional mismanagement. But the inability of publications to criticize lends to an increasingly dire need to end a practice which allows officials to bury their constituents’ concerns.
Despite provisions theoretically protecting their autonomy in the Campus Journalism Act, which publications have slammed as fangless and anti-student, many school papers remain closely monitored by their respective institutions, which often wield school policy to operationalize suppression. A system of prior review, wherein authorities interfere editorially by requiring their approval before publishing, continues to pervade these media outfits.
Many publications have been pressured into self-censorship as a result, like University of Santo Tomas Senior High School’s La Stampa in 2018, given how their administrators' control over their newsrooms, finances, and academic standing has often been used to threaten retaliation.
The Campus Press Freedom Bill has been forwarded by advocates as a solution to fix the Campus Journalism Act. Yet as it remains stuck in congressional purgatory, the clamor for an immediate cure to censorship issues has only intensified.
Some had sought to rally high school publications in the past in a manner similar to the College Editors Guild of the Philippines. Its secondary counterpart, the High School Editors Guild of the Philippines, was short-lived, but the need remains for such an alliance that connects these student publications with resources to enhance their critical reportage and challenge censorship.
Only in a united fellowship can young campus journalists mobilize against forces that seek to silence them and achieve the victories their respective communities sorely need. It is in moving away from a competition-driven program—dividing and isolating them from one another—that they can finally embody the mandate of public service entrusted to them by their constituents.
Empty platitudes surrounding press freedom must end. When academic institutions forget that their students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gates, they must be reminded that press freedom includes their campus journalists, too. ●
