EDITORIAL – Has the media lost respect for right to privacy?

A news report on ABS-CBN's TV Patrol on the evening of last Thursday, July 14, unwittingly exposed an as yet unrecognized and unacknowledged tendency of the Philippine media to abuse and trample on the rights of private citizens.

The story in question, or what the tv reporter and the giant network saw fit to run as a legitimate story, involved a drunk man who spent the entire time he was shown on tv trying to get at the cameraman, obviously resenting the coverage.

Whatever the man's crime was, aside from his being clearly drunk, did not take up much time in the report. Clearly, what was important to the reporter, and to the network as well, was the effrontery of this drunkard to challenge the high and mighty media.

Things like these are never admitted. But clearly the tv reporter resented the challenge to his authority as a member of the Philippine media, perhaps assuming that such membership has vested in him superior rights than others.

For why else would that segment have been aired on nationwide tv when whatever incident attracted the reporter in the first place did not even merit thirty seconds worth of narration in the report? Clearly the basis for airing the footage was the attempt to attack the cameraman.

So what? Far greater and more professional journalists are getting harassed in more life-threatening ways elsewhere without whining and making an issue out of it. That is because they know such things come with the job.

The trouble with a growing number of Philippine mediamen is that they think they can just barge into people's lives as if every incident that attracts media attention is automatically transformed into a matter of public interest that must be immediately aired.

What has happened to media ethics? What has happened to basic respect for the privacy of private citizens. That man who was drunk did not automatically lose his right to privacy just because he was drunk.

Even in his inebriated state, the man still had sense enough to want his privacy respected. But the reporter and the cameraman did not understand this. The only thing they saw was that their all-too-important selves were challenged. They were worse than the drunk.

And yet, what makes this particularly nettlesome is that the Philippine media is not entirely at fault here. Even the government has made it a practice to make a public spectacle of parading crime suspects even if they have not yet been convicted of any crime.

On a wall in the editorial offices of the Chicago Sun-Times hangs a framed picture of a front page of the newspaper. On it was splashed the photo of a woman cradling a dead son. The picture is a reminder of a loss the paper suffered in court for invasion of privacy.