68. KBP considers accrediting content creators

It is a good idea but possibly a little late

The Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas has revived talk of accrediting content creators and vloggers and expanding coverage of the organization’s Broadcast Code to include them, a move that it said would help creators be more responsible with their content.

Accrediting vloggers has been brought up every now and then since Duterte was president, when the Palace said that it was considering allowing them and social media influencers to cover events and speeches.

RELATED: How pro-Duterte bloggers went from the margins to the mainstream of Philippine politics on the back of fake news

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Welcome back to Slow News Days, a hopefully weekly newsletter on journalism and journalism-adjacent topics in the Philippines.

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The proposition was met with some resistance (and outright horror) at the time, and again when it was brought up during the first year of the Marcos Jr. administration, but times, circumstances and the media landscape have changed a lot since then.

With many, if not all, newsrooms putting out content online, KBP president Noel Galvez notes that “broadcasters” are no longer just on TV and radio but are also “using the technology that is available right now.”

Of course, viewers would benefit from vloggers and content creators observing ethical standards in the information that they provide — if that is even what audiences go to them or even online for anymore.

RELATED: Who among the 2025 senatorial aspirants have been sources of mis- and disinformation?

A decade, possibly even half a decade ago, accreditation by the KBP would have provided the benefit of being an assurance of quality or of access to spaces reserved for journalists, but content creators have managed to thrive without us — or even despite us.

One problem with self-regulation, although still preferable to government regulation, and things like ethics is the regulation itself. Since they cannot be imposed (at least not really, not in people’s hearts), one has to trust that the person claiming to work under a certain code really does.

Bolting KBP — or, to be fair, NUJP — does not carry any real penalty and does not bar anyone from the practice of journalism or of content creation.

Top network GMA isn’t a member and Quiboloy media company SMNI was a member when it was actively engaged in maligning and red-tagging all and sundry, eventually leaving the organization “[b]ecause they could not follow the Broadcast Code of the Philippines.”

SMNI still operates, though, and is probably even more partisan than it used to be, a feat previously not thought possible.

The KBP proposal is a good idea on its face, and there may be some vloggers and content creators who would take them up on the offer when it finally comes, but I am not sure many would.

After all, part of the draw of being an independent is being able to do, say and stream what you want and not being part of mainstream media and its institutions might even be what draws their viewers to them

If we’re being honest, broadcast and mainstream media in general have been playing catch up for eyeballs in recent years. We’re still pretty big, but one doesn’t seem to have to be anymore.

KBP’s Galvez acknowledges as much in his pitch for members to produce new content that is relevant to the public: "It's very important for us to be relevant. Pagka relevant tayo, magsu-survive tayo and hindi lang 'yun, magta-thrive tayo.”

(If we are relevant, we will survive. And more than that, we will thrive)

At a recent informal gathering — more drinks-around-a-table than an actual roundtable — colleagues and contemporaries tried to wrap our heads around the thought that we might be the last generation, or at least cohort, to do this in a way that would still be recognizable to those that came before us (and even then, we get complaints).

It has been a very challenging couple of years and the coming ones will likely be that way too, if not more.

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• On a related note, Rappler’s Don Kevin Hapal writes in the New Internationalist on the Philippines’ Disinformation Disinformation Machine from Twinmark — a commercial propaganda network uncovered during the Duterte administration — to what the landscape is now in 2024.

• (The) Sheila Coronel offers Ten Tips for Reporting in an Autocracy in the Columbia Journalism Review, which I initially thought was ill-timed — because, have we not been? — but realized it was for US colleagues. It only took me half a second to get it, to be fair, and it’s also still applicable to us.

• Some newsrooms, like The Guardian in the UK and Vanguardia in Spain, are leaving Twitter, saying it has become “a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to influence political discourse.”
  
  It has never been a good driver of views — NPR left a while ago and has survived — and I have been thinking lately of how being on it makes me even just a little complicit in all that Musk has been doing.
  
  People have been flocking to rival and lookalike Bluesky but it’s early days and we don’t know how that will work out. Maybe the shift will get us off social media eventually. We might get to actually, as they say, touch some grass.

• The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility is holding its Jaime V. Ongpin Seminar on Nov. 19, where the absolute best in our profession will talk about best practices and future prospects for the industry and craft.

• President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has appointed veteran journalist Joe Torres as the new executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Media Security, a development that colleagues are viewing with hope. Comments on the previous PTFoMS heads are unprintable but let us just say that Torres seems to not have been cut from that same cloth.
  
  Human Rights Watch researcher Caloy Conde has a podcast interview with him, where he says there will be no red-tagging by the agency under his leadership.
  

• Meanwhile, UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan again raised concerns over the protracted trial of Tacloban journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio, noting she is only getting to testify in her defense nearly five years since she was arrested.
  
  “That itself raises serious questions about the fairness of the process,” the special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression said this week.