Why Philippine Media is Facing a Crossroad in Ethics In DU30’s
Time?
……Michael a. Bengwayan….
Many readers of leading
broadsheets and those with time to kill hearing obviously information imbalance
on TV raise their eyebrows at the
messages they are getting these days.
One can only speculate, these news sources have motives,
other than factual, fair and balanced news.
Pundits say it’s politics. Others say, there is more to it
than meets the eye.
Truth is, the
information imbalance has taken its worst form of globalization. Associated
Press (AP), Agence France Presse (AFP), Reuters and United Press International
(UPI) throw so much information garbage to the Third World but nothing is heard
in the developed world about the good things happening in the rest of the world.
Except bad things about the developing nations, of course,
that hog the limelight
This resulted to the emergence of media wires more appreciating of the
developing countries contributions to the global community—Interpress Service,
Panos News and Features, Gemini News Service—to name a few.
Not to be outdone CNN and BBC do the same things—highlighting
wars, disasters, famine, death and destruction—from the smallest country in
Africa to the Middle East to the South Pacific. But barely mentions that a poor
farmer in Aceh is contributing so much effort to reducing global warming.
Such gave rise to Al Jazeera.
It is evident the market economy has caught up with the media,
making it a producer of commodities. Creating for itself an artificial
homogenous culture where consumerist interests and values are dominant, diversity
is suppressed and stereotypes are enforce.
In other words, good news is bad news. Bad news is good
news. It is better to portray drug pushers being killed, rather than a society
and future generation being saved.
Much better to question about the rights of criminals and to
hell with the rights of criminals’ victims.
Because cash mentality and market forces have marginalized
the real intentions of journalism
The media has been globalized, unable to escape Marx’s
theory that the ” bourgeoisie in exploiting the world market, has given a
cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption [sic] and as in material so in intellectual production”.
Once at University of Linnaeus’ cobbled streets in Kalmar,
Sweden, I sat down at a burger outlet with Editor Carlos Dada of El Salvador’s
El Faro who said “ there is little difference between CNNization and
McDonaldization. Both push blatantly advertisement giving rise to less
intellectual audiences and consumers, seldom wary of the source, credibility
and implications of information”.
Right there and then, I looked at him, at my Big Mac and
threw it on the stone pavement. I had been eating but equally supporting the
enemy.
Carlos, who donned Levis the whole month, had been sleeping
with one.
Globalized journalism is the newest threat to freedom of
expression. And wittingly or unwittingly, our broadsheet and leading TV media
have been feeding it. Because what they print and air are picked up by global
media and it adds to their coffers.
It is evident by the Western media’s domination of
communications technology. It creates an information imbalance where the flow
of information from the West is immensely overwhelming, while only the bad news
from the rest of the world goes to the west.
The world hears of the US political campaign everyday while
2 million people are dying in Sudan and oil companies raze thousands of hectares of forests in Papua New Guinea.
Globalized media can control and colonize the mind. It
results, among others in the marginalization of other forms of media like
public access media.
You must be thankful there is social media.
Even if the local journalist covers much of the truth, he is
sidelined because of globalized media. Unknowingly, he is being silenced. And
more precision than other blunt strategies.
We are all globalized. Who is not? And yet I maintain, we
are not all the same. Distinctions must be made.
The future of a balanced, fair and truthful information
sharing hangs in the postmodern, geographic and neo-liberal economic order.
But more than this, it should rest on a certain amount of
sense and sensibility./Michael a. Bengwayan
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