The Philippine mainstream media’s honeymoon with objectivity, as a professional consensus, offers a perfect cover to cheat on the public.
Every night Mike Enriquez, one of GMA News’s marquee broadcasters, booms out the tagline—“Walang kinikilingan, walang pinoprotektahan, walang kasinungalingan, serbisyong totoo lamang.” This insistence on impartiality translates into impassivity, a willingness to let powers-that-be off the hook while seeming as if above the fray. Such fence-sitting stems not even from any principled journalistic posturing, but simply from a willful disregard for all but its business stakes.
Not even an attack close to home would budge the network. On the heels of Congress’s decision to reject ABS-CBN’s franchise renewal, GMA’s chairman and CEO Felipe Gozon boasted of the network’s “ability to balance ratings growth with sound financials.” He spoke of how the management had entered the last fiscal year from “a position of strength,” boasting of a debt-free status as of end-March, and a P16.5-billion revenue, a windfall of about eight percent more than it had gained in 2018.
Granted, Gozon disclosed all this at the network’s annual stockholders’ meeting—hence the self-praises—the least the GMA honchos could do was remark on or acknowledge the death blow to its archrival. Instead, when one of the shareholders brought this up, Gozon said, “I prefer not to comment on that.”
It would not have hurt to extend even the most anodyne sympathies to ABS-CBN, even in the same breath as its showboating and gloating. Such a refusal to say anything at all speaks volumes about whose interests the Philippine media elite puts a premium on. Suppose an expression of solidarity was beyond consideration, the least GMA could have done was report on the issue fairly and accurately.
Yet, after its competition went off air, on May 5, GMA’s 24 Oras aired a one-sided interview with the chair of the Federation of International Cable TV and Telecommunications Association of the Philippines (FICTAP), who parroted the same grounds for the network’s shutdown that had been contested in a Senate hearing. Only after this incurred viewers’ ire did GMA release, two days later, ABS-CBN’s rebuttal to FICTAP’s claims, and by then it had already reneged on its credo about currying no favor.
Even the pretext of objectivity hardly excuses away any pretensions to disinterest, when no less than the newsroom—and the values it embodies and the democratic keystone it is founded on—has itself become the subject of the news.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s Malacañang, with supermajorities in the legislature, has set out to upend what were once inviolable freedoms, and betrays no sense of reluctance or remorse for perverting the letter of the law. He takes little interest in the nuts and bolts of governance, but he knows enough about the fragility of liberal democracy’s checks and balances to act free of worry about being held accountable. In his autocratic project, the press is just one casualty in the making.
He knows, too, that his words are always fodder for news, soaked up so unwittingly by the majority in whom, by bandying about claims of fake news, he has inspired distrust of the media. When, days after the denial of ABS-CBN’s request for franchise renewal, Duterte claimed to have “dismantled the oligarchy” in the country, his supposed noble cause could not ring more hollow, more contradictory.
Though, unquestionably, the Lopezes of ABS-CBN are media barons and own other extensive business holdings, still a slew of Duterte’s cohorts, in fact, belong to landed families who continue to cash in on the state’s coffers. They do so in exchange either for giving the president a leg up somehow or, in the case of GMA’s bosses, for their silence and acquiescence, even as Duterte wavers on ethics and matters of public good—even if his hostility could just as easily shift to them at once.
What is disconcerting about GMA’s complicity are the failings of the dominant media that it lays bare. Now the country’s largest broadcaster, the network wields influence and the pocketbook that alternative media outfits, struggling for survival in an increasingly fact-free, profit-driven information ecosystem, do not have. It could choose to step up—invest in resources to beef up its enterprise coverage—or step aside in good faith, letting its braver fellows throw down the gauntlet on Duterte’s ruinous agenda.
Gozon has shared with GMA’s stockholders a plan to launch new digital entertainment channels. It would scarcely harm the public if, in the meantime, they were to miss ludicrous soap operas. Meanwhile, its journalism which moguls have long hijacked should carry on operating, by design, as a watchdog. Yet, rather easily, it becomes more hamstrung than it already is when corporate managers sell it off, literally or otherwise, to the next highest bidder, which, on Duterte’s watch, could soon be the government. If that happens, journalistic objectivity might as well be a shorthand for moral bankruptcy. ●
This article was first published online on July 31, 2020.
