Un-'straight' is not crooked news
In a side story over the weekend, lawyer Larry Gadon revealed that he does not believe in masks, an opinion he has a right to have but one that nobody is the better for for knowing.
Maybe the intention in picking up the story was to highlight how someone who likes to call people stupid does not believe in the science that has forced us to wear the masks outside for the past five months.
It was not presented that way, though, and his thoughts on masks — and the photo of him wearing a face shield with a face mask taped to it that prompted his statement — were presented as valid.
Some reported his face shield setup as “unique” and “quirky” instead of the more accurate “stupid” as if he were some funny old man and not a failed senatorial candidate with a following of around 1.2 million on Facebook and a pattern of being the government’s cat’s paw.
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A radio station even posted his rejoinder days later to criticism that he had set a bad example by not wearing a mask.
His video reply, which addressed nothing but gave him a platform to bash the vice president, is probably still available on Twitter.
The reports were not wrong per se — Gadon really did say those things and he really believes the mandatory wearing of masks is an overreaction — but they were nonetheless dangerous for having been reported with hardly any context.
That, sadly, is how some expect us to report the news.
Someone said something or did something and that’s the story, as if things happen in a vacuum and all the reader really needs to know are the immediate facts.
The Department of the Interior and Local Government this week, for example, took exception to a story we wrote on the launch of their “BIDA ang may Disiplina” campaign for pointing out that it was an extension of the ‘discipline’ narrative that the government has been pushing since May.
In a letter, the department disputed survey data that suggested that most Filipinos wear masks when they leave home and many follow physical distancing guidelines by citing violations and apprehensions recorded by the Philippine National Police.*
“[T]he purpose of the BIDA ang May Disiplina campaign is to encourage the family and the community to take the frontlines and police their own rank without resorting to law enforcement,” the department said.
“It is not about law enforcement but about volunteerism, self-discipline and the family and community leaders defending their place against the pandemic,” it also said.
On its face, there is merit in that. Perhaps compelling compliance with guidelines is not “enforcement” when not done by police.
Perhaps saying communities are ultimately responsible for their safety is not the same as blaming their “lack of discipline” for the spread of the virus.
But consider that the PNP has put up checkpoints and designated its officers as “quarantine rules supervisors” at the barangay level to, in their words, compel compliance with quarantine protocols.
Consider that the task force on quarantine enforcement has been continuously saying that people have been defying the rules “or using their exemptions and identification cards ‘to deliberately violate the strict quarantine rule on non-essential travels.**’”
READ: DILG: 'Disiplina' campaign about volunteerism, not enforcement
Consider also that the same DILG has proposed jailing people for 15 days for wearing a mask incorrectly and it’s an entirely different picture.
But the DILG insisted that the launch should have been written like “a straight news article where the reporter draws no conclusions and lets the reader makes [sic] up his own mind.”
I agree that the reader is free to make up their own mind, but how equipped would they be to do that with “just these facts”.
For that matter, how equipped would we be to report if we were limited to just what was said?
Certainly, there are news outlets that present “just the facts” — we do it too sometimes — and there are readers who prefer that kind of treatment of the news, as basically just a record of things that happened and of things that people in power said.
But there is a space for reporting that looks at how seemingly separate facts and events may fit together. This isn’t even anything new or groundbreaking or controversial.
The Columbia Journalism Review, as early as 2003, cautioned that:
[O]ur pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to “truth.” Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you’re on deadline and all you have is “both sides of the story,” that’s often good enough. It’s not that such stories laying out the parameters of a debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our obsession with, as The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward puts it, “the latest,” we fail to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false.
The call for a “view from nowhere,” I feel, is for a view from a place of comfort for both the news producer and the consumer.
*Apprehensions that we also reported on and often cite.
** Compliance with quarantine protocols is far from perfect, of course, and there are people who break the rules. But, as Bulatlat’s Janess Ann Ellao says on her Media Matters podcast, does this have to be the prevailing narrative? Should we not, for example, also look into why some of these violations happen?