Bringing integrity back to reportage

There are fads even when it comes to making choices regarding college courses to take. The past decade saw a lot of physical therapy students along with full-fledged doctors taking up nursing since there was a huge demand for PTs and nurses in the United States. Those career choices are no longer as hot today.

I noticed, however, that culinary courses are still popular — maybe because the young have this notion that you just learn how to cook and then you’re off college. It’s not a piece of cake — so swear those taking it.

A lot of students are also into computer science and this may continue given the never-ending evolvement of cyberspace.

But what seems to me is a timeless course is mass communications. Since it was introduced within the groves of academe toward the late ‘60s and became extremely popular in the early ‘70s, it had always been on the list of most high school graduates entering college.

But are mass comm students being trained properly in school? While I see a lot of reporters churning out impressive assignments for various local networks, I am still generally bothered by the work ethics of most people currently employed in television today. There is something wrong, very wrong within the system that breeds superficiality. Work integrity, too, is sorely missing.         

Any hardcore journalist will risk life and limb for a scoop. In news programs today, it’s all about having stories that are exclusive. All their headlines scream that.

Female reporters in the recent past idolized Nellie Bly. I won’t be surprised if today’s generation probably doesn’t even know who she was and what the kind of impact she made in the field of journalism. Why, her life story was even turned into a made-for-TV movie in the early ‘80s.

Nellie Bly was the pen name of this great American woman (born Elizabeth Jane Cochran) who went undercover to investigate the very core of society’s ills. One of her biggest stories was when she posed as a lunatic to get admitted to a mental asylum in New York. There she saw for herself how the inmates were beaten up, bathed in cold water in freezing temperature and forced to eat spoiled food.

Later, her curiosity made her circle the globe to check if it was truly possible for the fictional character Phileas Fogg from the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days to achieve such feat. To everyone’s astonishment Bly did even better. She accomplished it in 72 days and six hours.

Among our local journalists, Rodolfo T. Reyes also tried living among dope dependents to bust a drug syndicate and the exposé he did later became material for the Eddie Romero movie Sa Piling ng mga Sugapa.

Very few of today’s journalists, however, can still do undercover work because everyone’s face had become familiar. Those who are not on TV do Facebook. The people sent out to those sex den raids are usually the production staff whose journalistic instincts have yet to be sharpened. They can flush out all the sex workers from those seedy establishments week after week, but has anyone bothered to look into the operations of those powerful people running the protection racket that coddles these prostitution joints? And so it’s back to business for everyone after palms had been greased (you know whose).

This kind of scenario is just too favorable for the public affairs programs because it’s see-you-again at the next raid. Sex truly sells and even translates into ratings. No wonder, most TV reports today only get to scratch the surface of social issues. Everything begins and ends with the survey sheets. There’s no more real reportage as in the old days.

A real journalist should be able to dig deeper into the root of every story. And should be there in the scene.

While it is true that some had tried living among the poor for days or even with mental patients, they only get to share how it feels like to be hungry or neglected and abandoned. No real exposés come out of these stories since there’s nothing like a camera to make a person conscious of his behavior. The subjects and those around them will put up a show because they know they’re being filmed. Besides, were there solid reforms after those stories were aired?

Laws are also stricter today. It is actually illegal to put a conversation on-air without the other party’s knowledge and consent. Most shows dabbling in exposés get away with it maybe because if you were a prostitute caught practising your trade, are you going to come forward to complain?

I can’t blame television crews for violating at times the human rights of their subjects. They need talking heads. They need sound bytes.

Unfortunately, the popularity of television had made reportage lose its soul. How I pine for another Nick Joaquin, who used the pseudonym Quijano de Manila to write about crimes and other social concerns in the metropolis, particularly in the very colorful ‘60s.

In his writings, he didn’t have to blur faces of sources who didn’t want to be identified. He described them vividly in words and sentences and you practically saw the face of his subjects in his writings.

Those were simpler times, of course, when print was more powerful than TV. When journalistic ethics were still observed. When we were told the whole truth.

We may see videos that are presented for shock effect, but we may never know the real story behind some cases being tackled on TV. Francis Xavier Pasion’s indie film Jay illustrates all that.

Yes, I still encourage the young to take up mass communications. But I appeal to schools offering such courses to strengthen the moral fiber of their students and teach them the value of diligence and hard work before they are let loose in the world of television.