Cebu media got a drubbing on social media last week over their coverage of the police raid on the University of San Carlos Retreat House in its Talamban campus.
Most of the articles that eventually came out about the raid, which police and local media initially called a "rescue operation", were more nuanced but the initial reports went along with the police claim of a rescue, which led to Cebu reporters being criticized for parroting the government line.
READ: Police arrest students, teachers in Cebu City Lumad school | Raid or rescue? What we know so far about Lumad arrests in Cebu City
The Cebu Federation of Beat Journalists has since issued a statement in defense of its members who covered the operation.
They had been invited to cover the event, as it turns out, by the regional police office, with some of them given the chance to ride along in police vehicles.
Like most of dominant—and therefore, legacy—media, the mindset seems to be that the story that comes out in the paper is the actual story, as Sun.Star Cebu argues in an editorial on the incident:
"You ask for balance and enterprise; you may at least wait for the long form. Any discerning news consumer knows raw reportage is supposedly treated with a degree of tentativeness."
The Cebu press is its own community, and has its own culture and its own Code of Practice, so I can't really comment on how media there interacts with the competing interests and interest groups in the province.**
Sun.Star Cebu’s full story on the raid: Police 'rescue' 19 minor lumads
Reports and even snippets of reports on social media are stories in themselves, though, or should be seen that way.
They spread faster and, as we've seen with the Dacera case, the initial framing of an incident will likely stick.
Assuming that news consumers will have the time or inclination to read the full story the next day is a conceit that we can't really afford anymore.
Tweets and Facebook posts are their own content and ought to at least contain an attempt at providing context.
Readers demanding that the claim of a rescue operation be interrogated as soon as possible isn't necessarily an ideological line, although giving the police narrative primacy is somewhat of a political choice.
That the Lumad students were supposedly being rescued from a campus of a university run by a religious order ought to have at least raised questions of who the children were being rescued from and whether going in in combat gear was necessary.
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But it's easy to say that in the relative safety of working in online news in Manila. The dynamics are different for journalists working in regions outside the capital, where offending authorities can mean a crippling loss of access and even harassment.
At the very least, as in the case of a colleague working in Cebu, it can mean being called out by protective media relations officers.
The situation is likely worse outside regional centers, where the news is mostly on local government projects and on police and military operations.
This isn't because local journalists are less courageous or are not as good as those in Manila—I would argue that they're better and definitely braver—but because, especially during a pandemic, these may be the only stories available.
They have not been paid well even before COVID-19 hit. A veteran reporter in Davao City, for example, earns around P8,000 to P12,000 a month, according to, well, a veteran reporter from Davao City.
With budgets cut because of the pandemic, there are even fewer resources to pursue stories beyond the usual beat.
Offending an official by, for example, fact-checking their claims too much, could mean being booted out of chat groups and mailing lists. That could mean fewer stories to file for people paid for each story that actually gets published.
If reporters are timid, that may be because their choices are to report safer stories or to not be able to report at all. It would be easy to say that they should get out of journalism, but job hunting is even more difficult during a recession.
The obvious answer is for newsrooms to give them more funding and to pay them better but that presents another problem of where that money will come from. That does not have an obvious answer.
As always, my suggestion to readers who want better reporting is to promote stories that you feel were done well.
I don't know when Philippine media will go into the subscription model and whether that is a good idea or even one that will work, but believe that if news managers see reader support for stories that go beyond the usual beat reporting, then it will be easier to argue to make more of those stories.
* We also initially went with “rescue operation” in quotation marks, but changed the headline to “raid” once the Philippine National Police referred to the incident as one in an official statement.
**Cebu journalist Max Limpag is in a better position to comment on media there, as he does on self-censorship here: Where? For heaven’s sake tell me where!
Cebu also has the Cebu-Citizens Press Council as a "forum for media issues and for airing grievance based in Cebu City, Philippines" that also "aims to defend press freedom and promote professional journalism."
If memory serves, it also organizes Press Freedom Week, part of which is shown below: