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Friends have always wondered what impelled me to go
back to media and choose it over development work as my main
profession. After a decade away from media and carving a very
promising career in development, I have decided to re-enter a
profession that guarantees high tension, almost unmanageable
pressure and uncontrollable dynamics.
I could be hailed to court for
libelous or seditious statements, they said. Tens of practitioners
now suffer this ignominy for different reasons, the politically
motivated charges mostly flimsy.
While not in a state of war, the
Philippines is one of the most dangerous places on Earth for people
in media. With a million and one reasons, and with scarce funds, the
aggrieved can always find exterminators to kill journalists in this
unemployed-rich country. Some 58 have been killed after the Arroyo
ascendancy in January 2001 when extrajudicial killings became part
of the country’s political fashion. So why go back to media when
one’s longevity is better assured by the more laid-back type of
development work?
By becoming a full-time
journalist again, I am seen by friends as having abandoned a
professional culture that demands clear-cut structures, consensus
building, transparency and rigid adherence to rules. Compared to
media, these factors guarantee a little boredom, but also better
conflict management and more stability and control at a time that
one prefers to deal more with life’s complications, rather than
the febrile state of society.
Alas, predictable variables are
hardly present in media work. Even some practitioners agree it is
intrigue-laden, mysterious, dark, nebulous, dangerous and hardly
palatable to one already used to a comfortable, albeit work-filled
routine in development work. Linkages are probably better explained
and more restraint can be seen in development work, whose
practitioners never make loose connections and study issues more
intently. That partly explains why even government experts find it
hard to tangle with them.
More common grounds link media
and development than what meets the eye. Media is probably the best
avenue for development workers to share and propagate their values.
The media agenda becomes the public agenda, and the written or
spoken word becomes public opinion, for good or bad.
Media is probably the best avenue
to inform and educate the public. In my younger life, childhood
teachers demanded that we read the newspapers everyday and report in
class the latest goings-on. These included the debates generated by
a simple legislative measure, a political statement, or government
policy. These were veritable academic exercises, when we updated and
upgraded the information provided by our textbooks and supplementary
learning materials.
Media is among the best avenues
to discover the latest in development work. When one is barrio-based
or away from the centers of information, what goes into media—TV,
radio or the occasional newspaper—becomes the buzzword for barrio
residents, transients and development workers.
The media is the best avenue to
make barrio folk know about specific instances of corruption,
dynamite fishing, deforestation or even the war in Iraq, and what
development workers and activists are saying and doing about these
nightmares. Media reports on the concrete measures being undertaken
by different actors, giving a measure of hope and enforcing the
belief of the concerned that these problems can be hurdled.
Much had been raised about
media’s continuing failure to educate the public about social
innovations, and media has other long-time weaknesses. It runs after
oddities and half-normal phenomena, but its predilection is to be
writing about personalities, superstars, the rich, powerful and
influential, as if their every word and action will make society
stronger or topple over, whichever is the case.
Fieldwork is expensive, and
journalists need a higher level of training to better write about
how a storm surge affects ordinary fishers and how dynamites
decimated a rich harvest of seaweeds that could spell a year of
bounty for them. One needs more exposure, not to mention social
sensitivity, to write about how young bodies endure walking for 20
kilometers a day, ten each way, just to finish school. One has to
understand social nuances to explain efforts to bring the wheels of
justice to the barrios, or how social experimenters are improving
educational and health delivery systems.
Media may be writing about
superstars, but it hardly writes of social or even simple laboratory
experiments that bode changes in the way we say, do or even think of
things. It may write of innovations in information and communication
technology, but not of simple technologies introduced to the
barangays (like composting and material recovery facilities) that
tell people that change need not be so painful.
I feel it is my supreme privilege
to have been part of many adventures in development work that I can
now write credibly about, including its many debates, philosophies
and personalities. By going back to media, who says I have left
development work?
opinion@manilatimes.net
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