That it had to be said that alternative media is media may help explain the anemic response that dominant media has had to government accusing them of being the propaganda arm for communist rebels last week and the arrest of Manila Today editor Lady Ann Salem for alleged illegal possession of firearms and of explosives earlier this week.
There was scant coverage of the allegations against the AlterMidya network, made in a slideshow presentation at a Senate hearing into red-tagging.
To be fair, it happened hours into the third hearing into the matter and months after fatigue at streaming everything set in, but the alternative media network released a statement in response to the allegations made by the anti-communist task force shortly after.
On December 7, nearly a dozen groups issued a joint statement condemning the red tagging, calling it "callous, dangerous, and evidence-less."
The network, they pointed out, offers "independent readings of national issues and events—which a functioning democracy should welcome as part of a healthy pluralism in the public discourse."
"It is admirably committed to reporting on corruption, human rights abuses, and environmental issues, as well as the plight of farmers and workers. And some of its institutional members, including but not limited to Bulatlat.com and Northern Dispatch, have a well-deserved national reputation for high-quality journalism: hard-hitting, yes, but also rooted in the facts," they also pointed out.
Missing from the institutional signatories are corporate media newsrooms, including ours.*
Salem's arrest — one of seven in simultaneous raids that happened on International Human Rights Day — was met with an even more muted response from media.
There were statements of support from individual practitioners but not much coverage, a sad counterpoint to our old stand by that we let our stories speak for us.
That police say they found guns and grenades when they raided the condominium unit in Mandaluyong that she and labor organizer Rodrigo Esparago were staying is probably a factor, but the response to her arrest was in stark contrast to that to the arrest of Rappler's Maria Ressa** in 2019.
An attack on one is an attack on all, I have heard said in campaigns in (deserved) support of Rappler and of ABS-CBN. Less so in recent days.
I talked to alternative news site Davao Today's Kath Cortez, who is also a director and media safety officer at the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, and she attributes it to dominant media's hesitation (if not refusal) to recognize the alternative media's role in covering underreported stories and issues.
"Based on my experience, some in media even say 'alternative media' are not really media but are the PR component of progressive organizations," she says in Filipino.
That is not without basis. The lines between activist groups and alternative news outlets are blurred and reporting does tend to go into advocacy as well.
Cortez says there has also been a conscious effort to isolate the alternative press and, because the allegations and violations against them are often related to their reporting, "many [colleagues] see these incidents as too political or 'red'" to get involved in.
"Ha, they are political," we in the dominant media might say as we celebrate our balance and objectivity and soft sell the narratives of dominant political and corporate interests unmindful of how we label the marginalized as stubborn and in need of discipline.
Rallyists cause traffic we report as we focus on that and casually mention towards the end what they are rallying against. The homeless are stealing houses, we lament, without looking into whether anybody owns or is even interested in the housing units they occupied.
These are all political decisions. They just don't seem so because they're so normal. Even the decision towards bland writing and reporting "without color" to stay below the radar is political.
In a 2017 post arguing that the "alternative media" is historically the actual mainstream of journalism in the Philippines, journalism professor Luis Teodoro has this to say of dominant media:
"Although they claim to be true to the ethical standards (truth-telling, independence, humaneness, justice, and stewardship) and professional norms (accuracy, fairness, relevance, adherence to public interest, autonomy and accountability, among others) of journalism, the latter's observance of these principles often yields to the defense and enhancement of their owners' interests, which have ranged from denigrating attempts to compel mining companies to comply with environmental laws to resistance to the implementation of real agrarian reform — which amount to opposition to the changes the country desperately needs."
READ: Media literacy 101: the alternative press and media
That is also not without basis.
Teodoro, who is national chair of the AlterMidya network, points out in response to the recent red-tagging that "the fundamental ethical and professional responsibility of truth-telling in journalism has always been AlterMidya's guiding principle in both its workshops as well as in its own reporting, "concerned as it is with the need to develop the well-informed public vital to a democracy."
The decision to show support for a colleague — or, indeed, to even acknowledge them as a colleague — is, of course, a personal one.
For many of us, making noise about the legal troubles faced by Rappler and ABS-CBN may have been easier because we know people who work there. Maybe they are beat mates, or maybe we have been with them on coverage.
It would be harder to say the same for the alternative press with whom we in the dominant media do not interact as much.
Cortez says there has been good engagement between the alternative and "mainstream" media on issues like press freedom and on large campaigns like on ABS-CBN, Rappler, and the Ampatuan Massacre but admits that it has been a challenge to get dominant media to stand up for the alternative press.
"I think there is a need to keep the conversation going with the 'mainstream' and to engage with them in campaigns like those against red tagging," she also says.
"There are some who are supportive but it is also difficult for them to openly speak up for the alternative press because they are afraid or because they don't want to be seen as having political color."
While that conversation plods along in fits and starts, a reminder from The Philippine Daily Inquirer's Mariejo Ramos, who writes about the media landscape in a post for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom:
If the media were to truly serve their societal purpose, they should be capacitated to widen the circuit of influence over journalistic discourse—from figures of authority to marginalized citizens—and to challenge the way society's storytelling resources are traditionally distributed.
READ: How Politics and Propaganda Affect the Role of the Media as Gatekeepers of the Truth
Media as an institution and as an increasingly abstract and misunderstood fourth estate is already under enough fire that to fail to see an attack on one—even on one seen as an other—as an attack on all would be, as NUJP chair Nonoy Espina says in an online exchange, us living the oft quoted line: "First they came for..."
*We have concluded, over the course of many conversations, that we do not and cannot speak for the company we work in and can only join statements and campaigns as individual practitioners or through entities separate from company.
**Rappler is a signatory to the December 7 joint statement