My apologies for the silence of more than a month. There have not been a lot of slow days in recent weeks and often not enough hours in the day.
Anyway, this is still Slow News Days, a newsletter on and around the news. Thank you for sticking around (please don’t unsub when this email reminds you you’re still here).
If I had to pick just one thing that I am proud of starting at Philstar.com, it is our consistent stand against red-tagging.
I suppose it seems an expected thing since I’m in a journalists’ group that has taken a stand against red-tagging and has itself been red-tagged.
But I wasn’t yet in 2017, when we first started writing about how conflating activism with armed rebellion was a dangerous practice.
It wasn’t an ideological decision, either, and more an extension of the newsroom’s stand that accusations of being involved in the drug trade or of being a drug addict justified being shot to death and our horror at how whatever the president says is taken as true (except when he was ‘obviously’ just joking).
Even writing about the Lumad schools — according to this interesting interview (the elephant in the Zoom is at the 55-minute mark) with the anti-communist task force, a sign of how the “communist agenda” is manifested in our “communist front” media — was prompted by “huh, why would you bomb schools?”
It’s a complex issue that involves questions on ancestral domain, IP rights and the delivery of basic services in remote areas like those in Surigao del Sur and it serves nobody to accept a simple narrative like, for example, that communist rebels are tricking IPs into taking up arms against the government.
Or, on the other hand, that the Communist Party of the Philippine-New People’s Army is not recruiting from the IP communities. I am sure they are.
But that they are does not mean that this is done through the Lumad schools, especially when the allegations are based on claims made by unnamed supposed former rebels likely involved in disputes over matters like recognition as IP community representatives.
A lot has been said about asking difficult questions — senior colleagues have pointed out they are necessary and you can’t be legit if you don’t — but I have always favored basic ones* like “What does that even mean?” and “Does this make sense?”
I say all this now because the interview (watch the video, if you can) unnerved me more than a little bit — this isn’t even 1% of what colleagues in the regions face — and to show how easily the government can paint the very broad strokes of someone being a communist and therefore a terrorist.
And this is why we have to keep asking these questions and looking beyond government officials for the answers.
If that means being called “exclusively anti-government” and being called out by various pro-Duterte vloggers, personalities, and officials, that would still be a low price against the potential cost of not asking at all.
—
*Sometimes, we also ask silly questions like whether cops get high when they burn confiscated weed.
Relevant links:
“What opposition?” is being asked more often now as the 2022 elections near. One coalition has emerged (although it is yet unclear as what) among those in the political opposition, but analysts say they need to “have plans for the nation that go beyond being anti-Duterte”.
Meanwhile, the administration PDP-Laban party seems to be about to fragment, with a senior official calling for a national assembly that its party president says is against the rules.
The pandemic has not gone away and this is felt more deeply by relatives of inmates and detainees, who have not been allowed to visit since last year. Already deprived of liberty and even adequate food, these visits would have provided “really more psychological, emotional support — support for the everyday sustenance of the [Person Deprived of Liberty].”
The government’s anti-communist task force has named more spokespersons, including a lawyer with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. Rappler’s Lian Buan, in this podcast, navigates asking questions about government policies and accusations while making clear that these accusations are, in legal terms, malabo.
Something from journalist Twitter: This Newsweek piece by a former journalist who writes of the old days of “news, which was more balanced when it was the collective product of a group of reporters spanning the socioeconomic spectrum.”
Now, he says, news is “entertainment, far removed from the lives of most of the people who live and work in the United States.”
Fair and valid points that are applicable here but I’m also a little iffy about this bit:
The old-school reporters often had the backgrounds and the pugnacity to evaluate these claims and were not overly impressed by politicians. They knew what crap smelled like. But they were effectively blackballed and replaced by reporters who knew about the internet and were better typists.
I’ve seen enough of how our elders and how the online kids work to know that this kind of Jonty Cruz nostalgia for the magical golden years of news is inaccurate, unfair and even harmful.
Finally, the reason I’ve been more subdued online: A podcast interview with ANC’s Christian Esguerra. The episode description promises that he “drops one truth bomb after another – naming names and telling things as it is” and that is exactly what he does.