EDITORIAL - Press at the edges

If nothing else, Press Freedom Week 2009 should remind us that “journalism is a craft so essential when liberty teeters on the edges”.

This troubled country wobbles again on the edges as we confront a tension-filled national election campaign. Governance issues plague Cebu: From a city hall, necklaced by vigilante murders, to a province bogged down in land scandals.

An impoverished ill-fed people are shackled by amnesia and sedated by noontime soaps operas, critics claim. Is  the press similarly hobbled?

Trivia indeed overloads our coverage. A few of us ferret the significant but difficult story. Far too many swap easy cynicism for hard reporting. Truncated memories hurry us from one headline to the next. Thus, we rarely develop a vocabulary for the long haul.

Do 37 years strain our capacity to remember? In the evening of Sept. 21 1972, Ferdinand Marcos told us, without blinking: Slavery was the price for democracy, then teetering on the edges, to survive. He issued Proclamation 1081 and jailed dissenters, suspended human rights, abolished Congress and padlocked the press. 

Fourteen years of bleak dictatorship followed. A gagged press futilely tried to burnish the “New Society’s ” patina of progress. That bitter experience drilled into us the old axiom’s truth: “They who give up essential liberty for temporary security end up with neither liberty nor security.”

In those Orwellian years, the most vocal press freedom advocates morphed into the harshest of censors “Whenever freedom of the press has been permitted, Filipinos defended it with passion,” observes the book: ‘Marcos and Martial Law’ (Cornell University). Whenever it has been prohibited, they complied with government regulations with obsequiousness.”

This historical tutorial on “lapdogs” need not paralyze us. Awareness of yesterday’ frailties can anchor tomorrow’s strengths. Cebu Press Freedom Week organizers therefore ensured that these rites straddle the September week when, 37 years ago, it became “darker than midnight”.

Majority of today’s youngsters were born after the dictatorship’s collapse, demographers tell us. They are tomorrow’s leaders. Their notions of tyranny are sketchy and their grasp of what People Power wrested back is tenuous at best. So is their sense of stewardship for nurturing restored freedoms. 

“We are made wise, not by our recollection of the past, but by responsibilities for the future,” George Bernard Shaw wrote.