LuisTeodoro.com

The kidnapping of ABS-CBN anchor Ces Drilon has again raised and underscored a number of professional and ethical issues in Philippine journalism practice.

The professional issues certainly include the need for media organizations to adopt guidelines in the coverage of crisis and conflict situations. As a companion to those guidelines, safety training for those likely to be covering crisis and conflict situations has also become more and more urgent.

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It’s become conventional wisdom among observers in the United States and other countries that a Democratic Party victory this November will mean a shift in US government policies at home and abroad. It doesn’t matter who the Democratic candidate for president will be. Although they have different styles, the thinking went, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would undo the damage eight years of the George W. Bush presidency have inflicted on both the United States and the world.

Barack Obama’s emergence as the Democratic Party candidate for President this November is at least partly due to the results of the surveys, most of which show that despite his race, Obama could defeat Republican John McCain. Despite her support across a broad spectrum of white workers, the middle-class and women, Hillary Clinton’s being a woman, and an aggressive one at that, has been widely held against her. It suggests that sexism’s an even more difficult hurdle in US politics than racism.

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“The next coup will be at 8 p.m. tonight,” Kavi Chongkittavorn declared at the start of a meeting of the board of directors of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) last week in Bangkok. Kavi is editor of The Nation, one of only two English-language newspapers in Thailand, and chairs SEAPA. Five journalists’ and media groups from Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand comprise SEAPA, a non-governmental organization founded in 1998 for the defense and enhancement of free expression and press freedom.

The ever good- humored Kavi meant his “announcement” as a joke. But as the whole world knows, a military coup removed the Thaksin Shinawatra government from power one sultry night in Bangkok in 2006. Although the generals did eventually allow elections, and there’s a civilian government in power in Thailand, political instability and the fact that coups have occurred so often in Thailand have made another Night of the Generals at least possible.

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The foreign chambers of commerce based in the Philippines have joined the debate over power issues — and earned accusations that they’re interfering in what’s alleged to be a government effort to reduce electrical power costs.

The chambers of commerce of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea and Europe wrote Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo early this week. Regime threats to review and possibly renegotiate power contracts with Independent Power Producers, the Joint Foreign Chambers said, “will cast doubt on the stability of policies and regulatory rules and on the integrity of investment promotion programs in the Philippines.”

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“Texters” and “texting” are relatively new additions to the English language, and it’s Filipinos who seem to have contributed both. At least they’re newer than that exquisitely ironic term from the martial law period, “salvaging”. “Salvaging” has long found its way into the vocabulary of some foreign writers, among them the Canadian fictionist Margaret Atwood, whose novel The Handmaid’s Tale uses the word as the Philippine military and most Filipinos understand it.

As late as 2000, when Joseph Estrada was still president and only about to be ousted from office, the New York Times’ Wayne Arnold had noted how Filipinos had added a new verb to the English language—or at least to the variety of it common in these parts.

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Let’s not exaggerate. Retired Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hermogenes Esperon is not really as Senator Consuelo “Jamby” Madrigal described him.

Senator Madrigal compared Esperon to Adolf Hitler and to Josef Stalin when she learned that Esperon had been appointed Presidential Peace Adviser. Esperon did have command of the Armed Forces. But he commanded no force as powerful as the Wehrmacht as Hitler did, or an army as vast as the Red Army Stalin used to defend Soviet soil.

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The May 13 launch of a book on political ads by Newsbreak magazine has recalled, if only temporarily, attention to the role of political ads in Philippine elections. In the elections of 2007, as in 2004, it indeed seemed obvious enough: spend on the ads and win.

Releasing its study on media coverage of the May 2007 elections in August that year, the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility recalled that since the 2001 lifting of the ban, political advertisements had been a major factor in winning elections. Manuel “Mar” Roxas’ case was the shining—or dim—example of how those with money to burn could make their political fortunes through paid ads, mostly in television.

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