Such conversations-on-the-run are often more educational for me. They provide me definitive indicators about what our students are thinking about – and how they are thinking about it.
Last week, however, I encountered a different sort of experience with these impromptu conversations.
On my way to my evening graduate seminar, I was intercepted by a group of UP journalism students who wanted to know why I supported liberalization of investments in the mass media during the debates of the Consultative Commission on Charter Change. So I ran them through the arguments, stealing some time from my own graduate students.
Later that night, as I emerged from my seminar, I found even more journalism students were staked out of my door. That was strange. Undergraduate UP students usually evaporate from campus before the sun sets, especially under heavy rains, hurrying home or to the malls.
This second wave of journalism students were basically asking the same questions about liberalizing investments in the mass media. I realized immediately that on the question of liberalization, I belonged to a really tiny minority on campus.
I always, with an element of humor, argued that UP Diliman was some sort of Jurassic Park for extinct ideologies. That evening, the argument seemed so chillingly real.
These students, very likely parroting their mentors, were telling me that liberalization of investments in media would enable "foreign interests" to inflict on our culture. These foreign devils would overrun our media, exploit us and snow under our values. That sounded so seventies.
In their faces, I told them how appalled I was that they could even think that way. In this age of the internet, cable television, satellite reception, 3G telephones and rewritable DVDs, how could they even think that liberalizing investments in the "old media" would imperil our culture?
To grab their attention, I told them that the shallow "nationalist" protectionism that engulfs many areas of our economic policy produce structures that are anti-poor. Here I drew a parallel with our retail trade, having worked several years back to support its liberalization.
While our retail trade was nationalized, we had to endure an inefficient retail system that made consumer goods costly for the poor and for the rural population. Our average mark-up from factory prices to the final consumer buying from sari-sari stores was triple the global benchmark for efficient retail distribution. Even as our "liberalization" of retail trade was far from perfect, the resulting improvements in retail investments and a condition of competition significantly brought down the mark-up rates.
In the same way, limited investments in media produced for us a situation where the cost of accessing information becomes higher the farther you are from the center and the lower your income level is.
The cost of buying a newspaper like this one, for instance, increases the farther you are from Manila. When I buy this paper in the provinces, it costs several pesos more than when I buy it from any street corner in the city.
There is, today, a smaller percentage of the population reading serious newspapers than there was three decades ago. That is unhealthy. It should not be like this.
Because of insufficient investments, the cost of being informed has become prohibitive – especially for the poor rural population. The calamity is magnified by the parochialism, poor journalistic quality of our "old media." The situation can only be remedied by liberalizing investments so that a revolution in the business model of our media will accomplish a more mature journalistic culture and more efficient distribution of information.
Large swathes of our "old media" are controlled by oligarchic business interests or by powerbrokers using the media outlet as some form of political or business weapon. This explains why we have so many dailies even as only very few of them are actually profitable.
For as long as our media organizations are operated to serve interests other than efficiently distributing information, our journalistic culture will be endangered. There are some media outlets where journalists are poorly paid and expected to make their incomes as they go along, a situation conducive to corruption.
Or else, in order to survive, media outlets either sensationalize as a matter of course. Sometimes, the line between entertainment and information becomes extremely blurred.
In the modern world, we need news organizations to be of a certain magnitude that allows efficient news gathering and efficient information distribution. Instead of allowing that, our idiotic constitutional framework not only inhibits investment in media but also prohibits tri-media ownership in order to mitigate the influence of media oligarchs. That is double jeopardy. It prevents efficiency in media operations both ways.
Liberalize investments and the resulting competition will cure the problem of oligarchic dominance over information channels. Liberalize investments and the cost of accessing information will come down. Encourage strategic partnerships with international media networks and the journalistic benchmarks here will rise.
By prohibiting investments in content production, we end up importing content. See how much we import Latino, Korean and Taiwanese telenovelas.
Instead of exporting content, and creating tens of thousands of high-skilled jobs for animation artists, writers, producers and actors in an area where we have comparative advantage, the "nationalist" provision cripples our ability to compete. I don’t know how this situation where we increasingly import media content will be good for our culture – if that is what we should be concerned with.
In a word, I told these journalism students that if they intend to be media professionals, it is in their highest interest to fight for liberalization of investments in our mass media.