The half-life of grief extends far longer when you cannot begin to measure, in cold and concrete terms, what is lost, what amount of rage and sorrow and furor has been exacted by the loss. The anniversary of the shutdown of ABS-CBN, formerly the country’s largest broadcast network, reminds us of the fall of a stalwart yet flawed institution, the failure of checks and balances, the foreboding of graver hostilities.
It was an end that has forced on Filipino journalists an overdue reckoning not just with matters of truth and falsehood, but also with norms and ethics, with history and structures of power and, within them, the persistence of inequities and opportunities for subversion in all forms. It was an end that, even now, over a year on, still opens a sense of future that is ours for the taking and ours to decide on.
Any such reckoning should begin, as it did, with clarity about what confronts us. The seemingly most elementary practices have not been spared: What questions count? How do we frame them responsibly?
The conversation has laid out, in broad strokes, two camps of journalists of varying degrees of cynicism and imagination. There are those who, rather patronizingly, hold fast to the ways things are and have been done in the newsroom, by convenience or convention—a pursuit for soundbites, an undue reliance on press releases rather than shoe-leather reporting, a tendency to yield the microphone to the loudest voice in the room. On the other side are those who insist on a more intrepid, more conscientious brand of journalism that shuns orthodoxy and mediocrity. Dismissal of their causes and sources of passion as naivete, as high-mindedness, has tempted the jaded and the leery to reject the merit of their alternatives.
Yet, if the past five years offer any lesson, it is that the ivory tower must crumble, a process that, though necessary and inevitable, might take as long as it would to build a fortress brick by brick. And that is just as it should be. We cannot lapse into the dogtrot of presswork just going through the motions of it all, deadened and devoid of direction, creativity, moral aspiration. We cannot perpetuate what is clearly not working, what is dangerous, lazy, and irresponsible. We cannot condone such a line of thinking as pinning down the “elephant in the room,” an expression we have heard so often the past couple of weeks that it seems as if all journalists are ever good at is pointing out the obvious, with faux-gotcha questions.
The story never begins and ends with just the dramas fueling the news cycle. "Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed,” Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician, wrote in Process and Reality, in 1929. “Facility of observation depends on the fact that the object observed is important when present, and sometimes is absent.”
Despite our blinders and biases, we have common sense and intuitions of causality. We sift through the noise to find patterns and draw connections and, as journalists, to do more than just report what is right in front of us. The stories worth the most telling—about social justice and abuse of power, about radical ideas for reform—emerge from the margins of mainstream conversation and have not always figured prominently in the order of day, in our hierarchy of priorities, in the realm of possibilities. The hegemony of colonial masters, the sub-humanity of women and queer bodies, and the benevolence of corporations, among other myths, all used to seem true and forever until we chafed at their fallacies and hypocrisies.
Such is the duty of the press: to discern facts from bluster, to foreground trenchant truths against the humdrum of equivocations and the racket of clickbait headlines. We must refuse to echo details too gaudily laid bare in the light of day, none of which, really, is what you would call an elephant in the room.
For in our country’s cartoonish politics, the characters rearing their ugly heads, in interviews and press conferences, can only be trusted to spout claims whose function is distraction. Presidential speeches are a dodge. Gaffes and witticisms are a dodge. Red-baiting is a dodge, of perhaps the most pernicious sort. Outlandish quotes, no matter how many reactions they rack up on social media, are a dodge.
There are only so many sides to a story to chase, but always there will be yet another unfounded claim, another rebuttal, another sidebar, another lead on another statement too outrageous to miss out, and over and over again, there will always be one more political firestorm around the corner to wear us out. Most of us have become so inured to this soul-depleting formula that we fail to call for accountability and transparency, the more urgent tasks of serving as a check on power and prompting public action.
Our obsession with false equivalences and objectivity—this rhetorical trap of a neutral ground—is itself a dodge. Any such pretense obscures a lack of conviction, a refusal to acknowledge the political decisions made in the newsroom and the struggle with words and images in which we break and tell stories.
It is precisely this middle-of-the-road philosophy that a populist authoritarian is too eager to exploit. He could rest assured knowing some reporters would go out of their way to trot out spins to dignify and excuse his lies and litanies, however much they muddy the waters. This does not equal fairness. Nor is it even objective, to begin with, to give a pathological liar of a president equal coverage, or his words any more outsized latitude, versus the consensus on the human costs of his policies and pronouncements.
The exemptions from this government’s blitz of attacks have been few and far between. The free press, far from just the chronicler of this unfolding dark chapter of history, has provided warm bodies in the trenches and, from them, the heroes and victims of the president’s war on words, on dissent, on reality.
Last year’s ABS-CBN shutdown, perhaps the biggest media casualty yet, was sickening and egregious, if not for its scale and untenability, then for what it bodes for the hapless media groups and the hundreds of pockets of communities rooting for them to still brave the fray. Instead of feeling virtuous, the legacy media behemoths who, for now, remain unscathed had better embrace this moment to discard a culture of restraint and non-committal airs. They must challenge professional habits of defaulting to what is practical rather than what is just, to what has been tried and tested rather than what can rock the boat.
Left unflurried, institutional inertia begins to hold the press back and accelerate its obsolescence. History will not excuse us if, by insulating ourselves from criticism and plodding on business as usual, we fail to consider that we may not outlive a ruinous regime.
Tyranny flattens journalism and all watchdog institutions. Tyranny shatters our belief in ourselves as political actors. Tyranny extinguishes our confidence in the freedoms we hold dear and the capacities we have to enact change. Tyranny smothers any impetus we might find to speak truth to power not despite, but exactly because of, renewed assaults on our rights and liberties.
Tyranny, at its most insidious, would like us to despair and mourn what has been lost in the crises and the daily ways it empties us of dreams. For the goal of all tyrants is to force us to wither away and, in our languishing, to entrust our future to violent powers. But the half-life of grief is so called since we cannot afford the luxury of just rage and sorrow and furor the whole way through. We are too caught in immediate struggles to wallow in gloom or to hark back to an imagined state of normalcy before this presidency. We will have to channel our energy, at some point, towards getting down to work—that is all there is to do while we have yet to know how much worse it is going to get, before we take a turn for the better. ●
