A free press is an important cornerstone in a constitutional democracy that recognizes fundamental rights. Through a free press, the government and its officials are fiscalized into doing what is right, and in putting public interest above all other considerations.
History has demonstrated that the institution of the free press has been one of the most effective checks against corruption and ineptitude in public office, and the prime vehicle by which substance is added to the lofty principles that public service is a public trust, and that the people are the masters of government officials, and not the other way around.
A government that is always transparent in all its operations and transactions enhances the viability of a functioning democracy. American constitutionalists have a more picturesque term for this arrangement—“a government in the sunshine.” Indeed, when a government is willing to bask in the sunshine of public scrutiny and opinion, that government has nothing to hide from the people, and people have less reasons to distrust the state.
In contrast, a government that conceals information from the people, or which makes it well-nigh impossible for the people to access public documents imbued with a public interest, is a government that has skeletons in its closet. A government of this sort prefers darkness, and the evils that go with it. Those evils get magnified when the secrecy relates to anomalies involving public funds.
Evidently, news dissemination is the hallmark of the mass media in a free society. The information which the people derive from the news keeps them abreast of what the government and its officials are doing.
Editorials and opinion materials are just as important as the news. The ideas and views the people derive from serious newspaper and periodical columnists keep them abreast of why the government and its officials must be criticized.
While it may be true that information by itself can be liberating, more often than not, it is only through the critical perspectives offered by columnists and opinion makers in the mass media that the citizens in a working democracy can effectively fiscalize their government officials into doing good and doing right.
As every journalism course postulates, commentaries should never be passed off as news, and the traditional barrier separating the news (which must be confined to reporting facts without including opinionated material) from the commentaries (which is by its very nature an opinionated material) must never be breached. This postulate gives readers the freedom to form their own opinions about the news, and should they need help in formulating their opinions, the commentaries are there to lend a helping hand in that particular regard.
Many contemporary newspapers and periodical publications host writers who may have the best intentions of being columnists, but who end up unwittingly doing a disservice to their readers and followers. This is particularly true for those writers who make indiscriminate or general references to the past, both ancient and recent, but who do not bother to check on the veracity of the information they dish out.
Irresponsible information and opinion dissemination is detrimental to the best interests of media audiences, whether print, broadcast, or online. Worse, incorrect information is almost certain to end up as reference materials to future generations of Filipinos who tend to assume that anything memorialized in the media is true.
Sadly, many media outlets behave as if press freedom includes the freedom to be irresponsible. This can be seen not only in some newspapers and periodical publications but, shockingly, also in some books which profess to be historically sound and accurate.
Notorious in this regard are the commissioned biographies —those so-called commemorative materials about the life of certain persons, published to coincide with some anniversary in their life story, and paid for by relatives of the person whose life story is narrated. Many, if not all of these commissioned biographies focus only on the positive or flattering aspects of the life of the subject personality. Anything negative, incriminating, or embarrassing will either be toned down or ignored altogether. Shelves of popular bookstores are loaded with these types of unreliable publications which distort history or deodorize the official record.
The same may be said about many commissioned commerative books about establishments and institutions, especially those relating to business enterprises.
Some bookstore shelves still have copies of a book about the centennial of a Philippine political party. It has so many glaring errors in its narration of the country’s political history, but its readers may have no way of discerning which part of the book has errors.
Many of today’s youth assume that everything they see and read online, even those in the social media, is true. This mindset is triggered by sloth, because it takes considerable effort for one to verify the truth in whatever one reads. That mindset is also a threat to truth and academic scholarship because anybody can put up an online “news site” anytime, and through these “news sites,” anybody can easily disseminate false or misleading information to the complacent and the gullible. This alarming fact is confirmed by the recent proliferation of fake news online, both here and abroad.
Compounding the problem is the penchant of many cyberspace users to add what they know (or to put it more bluntly, what they believe they know) to the bottomless pool of unverified information being disseminated. Add to that the online trolls who are paid to pass off propaganda as news.
Because online information about anything is available to anybody who can press a key on a laptop computer or tap on a smartphone, many of today’s young Filipinos read up only when they need to, and only at the very minute they need to. As a consequence, the technology that makes information available at an instant becomes the very temptation and excuse for sloth and complacency.
We may not realize it yet, but these realities will soon bring about a disinformation nightmare in the country.
