Good news, bad news

When you read the papers or listen to the news these days you need to protect yourself with a plastic bubble. It’s a good thing GMA can take all the frenzy. But I think we should also watch out. Remember what Marcos did when he felt everything got out of hand?

I think enough has been said about that “expensive” dinner. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has joined the bandwagon now toward politicking. Susmariosep! The Filipino people have already judged her and we know based on her actions, what her morals and values are. So the politicos out there should just drop it! Let the people be the judge.

The problem is that we in the media are also so vulnerable to intrigues so we tend to eat the news as vultures attack on their next prey. Well-meaning people have been asking why newspapers cannot simply put only “good news” on page one and simply tuck the “bad news” away in the inside pages. Nowadays it is so easy to assert that Philippine media is not helping the country since many of us are only fostering a “negative” attitude among readers, televiewers and listeners. Still others say that the press is corrupt, and therefore anyone can get any story put on page one or suppress a story as long as he “comes across.”

My late father Max V. Soliven made an interesting parallelism about the press and other professions. He said, “claiming the press, media, newspapermen, newshens, columnists or editors are “corrupt” or “crooked” is just like saying that all lawyers are fools, all politicians are finks (indeed some are), all cabinet members are stupid, all Rotarians are rats, all cops are extortionists and all firemen wear red suspenders. There are Good Guys and Bad Guys in the press, sure enough, as there are in every other profession or club.”

He goes on by saying, “As for promoting a “negative” attitude, how does one refute that? When a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news. Columnists, admittedly, tend to carp. Opinion writers sometimes bitch. But there is no such thing as a dak-dak club or wrecking team. Most opinion writers and columnists would like to say nice things (and some do, but very few) but there are too many sad observations to write, too many things going wrong, so many grafters smug and complacent, so many injustices to be exposed. When the sun shines, it’s taken for granted. But when a storm or typhoon hits us, it’s a newsworthy disaster. Isn’t it?”

I wish we could publish only “good news” but this would be possible only if all the news were good. There are many countries in which only the “good news” appears. Are they cheerful and progressive? Most of them are dictatorships, where “bad news” has been banished by a wave of the tyrant’s truncheon, not his magic wand.

When I was a child, I had asked my father why Marcos was not allowing him to write. He told me that under the martial rule, the press was controlled. I asked him what would happen if the press was controlled. He said that like in the Soviet Union, for instance, Pravda (meaning “Truth”), the leading daily, used to be authorized to print only good news about the USSR (and bad news about America) until General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev bounced into power and decreed sunny glasnost and perestroika. Under Stalin, Malenkov, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Chernenko, Andropov even under Khruschev — did reading all that “good news” make the Russian and Soviet people happier, more progressive, more prosperous and more hopeful? He suspected that frustrated readers and televiewers tried to look into the cracks between sentences, so as to discover the real news behind the news.

And that is exactly what would happen if we publish only “good news.” Imeldific once asked the media to do so. Ferdinand Marcos went a step further when he slapped martial law on this deprived nation. He and his brother-in-law and his cronies bought up or seized all the newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels, so that only “good news” about the Apo and his works would see the light of day. Where did this get us? We were trapped in the darkness of ignorance and despair, gazing skyward almost in vain for the glimmer of a distant star.

So, enough said of the fallacy that “good news” will promote national unity and well-being. Those who are critical of what government does and the mistakes our leaders make are optimists. They hope that by exposure of what is wrong, reforms will be induced and justice done. The critics seek peaceful change, whereas the rebels seek violent change by the power of the gun. Which would we prefer?

A placebo is a pill composed only of sugar and other harmless ingredients, designed to give the suffering the psychological impression that they are being “cured”. Good news as a placebo only worsens the disease because it leads us to ignore it. We must know what is wrong with our society and with ourselves, before any solution or cure can be honestly prescribed.

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Education plays an important role in our fight against poverty. As such, we should protect those responsible for providing quality education to ensure a sustainable future for the coming generations.

According to Rep. Ulan Sarmiento, he filed three bills all envisioned to uplift the educational situation of the country and expand academic freedom as mandated by the 1987 Constitution.

The first bill is the Legal Aid for Teachers Act of 2009. The bill seeks to provide teeth of the provision of the Education Act of 1982 by directing the Integrated Bar of the Philippines to provide free legal service to all teachers who are impleaded in election-related cases.

The second bill envisions to strengthen and recognize the constitutional tax exemption granted to non-stock, non-profit institutions and to extend the same to, subject to the limitations provided in the bill, to proprietary schools, colleges and universities by amending Sec. 27(B) and Sec. 30(H) of the National Internal Revenue Code of the Philippines.

Lastly, the Magna Carta for Academic Freedom will implement through legislation the constitutional and jurisprudential guaranty of the academic freedom of higher educational institutions by clearly outlining the metes and bounds of the academic freedom reserved to the educational institution, the academic personnel and the students.

Let’s see what our solons give priority to in congress. Is improving the quality of education one of them?