The PMA's `mistah' cult / Printed media less credible?

Once, while having a one-on-one with President Fidel Ramos in 1996, we chatted spiritedly on the police and the military establishment. We talked about peace and order, graft and many irregularities in the police, not to mention the Armed Forces of the Philippines which had its own share of shenanigans. A graduate of the West Point Academy of the United States and a military man to the core, FVR nevertheless admitted our police and military were not performing very well and needed a swift, hard, crunching kick in the pants.

FVR was in a leisurely mood, his unlighted cigar hardly agitated at all, and so we talked. He gave me to understand he was in no hurry at all, that he considered conversation with some people relaxing, even challenging. This is something I have enjoyed with previous presidents from Diosdado Macapagal to Ferdinand Marcos, to Cory Aquino to FVR, who always had time to get beneath the surface of things, and pull out hidden threads of information and wisdom, not to mention gossip.

Marcos, when he was in the mood, was something. He loved to talk about great men, their deeds, their achievements. You could see he has enormously read, quoting from this or that philosopher. Napoleon was one of his favorites, if not his favorite, for he talked about him at length. But we are digressing. It is about President Fidel Ramos we wanted to write about today. Because we talked about the behavioral patterns of army and police officers who had graduated from the Philippine Military Academy.

FVR noticed there was a sharp difference in their academic training.

In West Point, patriotism, love of country, respect and even reverence for America's institutions were deeply ingrained in the cadet. He didn't seem to see this, or saw very little of it in the Philippine Military Academy (PMA). Or if it was really there at all, it was not a consuming trait of the PMA cadet that bade him to risk all for the flag -- if honor, pride and country were at stake. We brought out the names of some police officers, and, of course, I am not at liberty to reveal who they are. FVR said, rather indicated, they had little love of country and so they were doing what they did.

At that time, you will remember, daylight bank robberies were a dime a dozen. Suspicion was that some top police officers were involved which probably explained the robberies' consummate ease, speed and success. At one time in Makati, FVR was just four blocks away while a bank was divested of all of its cash deposits without a shot being fired. And then too, there was the Kuratong Baleleng massacre implicating top generals of the PNP who occupy even more exalted positions in the police force today.

How explain it? FVR's loquacity veered off at this point, like a wave curling round a rock, then flattening out.

In my mind and later on with some political observer friends, I took up the subject. I know many many Peemayers will disagree with me, as they have pelted me with tomatoes everytime I criticized the PMA and they retaliated by calling me a PMA basher. But the truth is -- and the PMA cannot wish this away -- the "mistah" cult in that most prestigious of Philippine military academies is branded deep in the cadet's psyche. Like college and university fraternities, perhaps even more than them, the "mistah" cult inculcates blood and bond ties that go beyond notion of love of country.

The master and the neophyte in the PMA are bound to each other by rites, customs, habits, reflexes, loyalties, fidelities, staunchnesses, fealties. These have a power and a mystical force that transcends almost everything else. Once the doors of the PMA are flung open after graduation, cadets turned officers -- whether they join the PNP or the AFP -- consider themselves destiny's chosen and behave as such. So what happens? They cover up for each other, except in very rare instances when Generals Panfilo Lacson and Roberto Lastimoso battled each other -- for turf and not necessarily for honor.

The "mistah" cult is what General Lacson is up against, assuming he is really sincere in cleaning up the PMA.

As you can see, generals' heads in the PNP have not really fallen off. Erring generals are just reassigned or transferred, not charged before the courts, not court-martialed. We can talk all day long about graft and dark misdeeds in the PNP, but nobody will ever be brought to book. Remember the day General Lacson threatened hell's fire on PNP officers who commandeered private cars and vehicles? Well, press reports said more than 250 such commandeered cars were returned by miscreant PNP officers. But none of the latter was ever charged, read the riot act or quartered. By gahd! They should have been fired.

Which brings me to another but related subject. Why is General Flor Fianza, formerly traffic police boss, now facing a six-month suspension for playing golf? Reportedly during office hours. I will concede General Fianza may indeed have played hookey golf, but why is he being singled out? So many PNP generals have done the same thing. I have one answer. General Fianza is not a PMA graduate, got up the ranks as a reservist. He does not belong to the "mistah" fraternity and therefore is expendable.

I know the man personally. Though not a PMA graduate, he is an out-and-out professional, honest, persevering, sincere, not your kind of policeman in cahoots with criminals. Flor is a credit to the PNP although the PNP under Panfilo Lacson doesn't think so and wants him grounded for six months. Okay, let's be fair. If you ground General Fianza for playing hookey golf, then ground the others, those who are PMA graduates, those who belong to the "mistah" cult.

Or are there other reasons for freezing General Flor Fianza?

If there are, we wish to know, the public wishes to know. I know of officers promoted in the PNP when they should have been in the brig, in isolation, maybe even in Muntinlupa because they brought shame to the force by their misdeeds.

The latest Media Pulse survey for the period December 9-20 contains a D section which states that "unlike television," radio and newspapers fail to gain credibility from a majority of the public. This time, I will have to sharply disagree with Prof. Felipe Miranda, a friend, a respected UP professor, whose every word during a survey briefing is normally gospel. But I am not a radio man, so I shall only speak for print media although for nine years, I hosted a multi-awarded TV talk show.

Professor Miranda makes the big and tragic mistake of lumping TV and newspapers together. TV, sir, is entertainment, 90 percent entertainment which caters to the many who love sitcoms, comedies, dramas, grisly murders and rapes, children's shows, cartoons, telenovelas, bicycled and non-bicycled movies, screen violence, and so on. Newspapers largely project news, its front page a megaphone on the main events, its op-ed pages an intellectual cerebration or elaboration of what the news is all about. Thus you have editorials and columnists, learned commentators who labor in the vineyard of journalism more than anybody else.

You don't have these on TV so I do not see where the comparison comes in. TV indeed has news programs but these are largely visuals or footages of the day's major events with hardly any intellectual effort thrown in. TV talk-show hosts merely ask questions of their guests, but do not quote Byron for elucidation, or Jeffrey Sachs or Walter Lippmann or Lester Murrow. I would put it another way, Professor Miranda, and please don't get offended.

The decision-makers of this country, the congressmen who make our laws, the high brethren of the Supreme Court, the president and his men, the nation's professionals, in one word, the highly educated -- or let's just say -- the educated, read newspapers. And they read newspapers because they not only want to be informed but brought to the water's edge by editorials that illuminate, columnists that analyze, investigative and in-depth stories that seek a submerged news Titanic. I agree. Since the advent of TV, newspapers have had to give way in the coverage of spot news. TV does this not only better, but faster. A president has an urgent message to communicate and he does this through TV. EDSA could never be adequately covered by print, or Kosovo or East Timor or the riots in Ambon and Irian Jaya. TV had to be the medium.

But can you honestly say, professor, that when it comes to credibility, TV has it over print? What TV has over print is audience, an audience as expansive as the sands of the sea, for TV is immediate and it is entertainment, show business from the word go. When TV seeks to analyze, it invites experts, professionals, its colleagues from the newspapers who have it in their grey matter -- because that is their job -- to interpret and analyze the news. What Pulse Asia is saying that more than half of the public fail to read a single newspaper within the last seven days is true. That was true a long time ago. Twenty years ago.

But credibility does not come with audience. It comes with wisdom and analytical reflection.