Fourth Estate, our convenient shortcut

I would like to greet The FREEMAN readers a Merry Christmas! The workday has resumed as I write this, but next week we are off again for a longer holiday break (the entire week for many) as we look forward to the new year.

For us in the academe, we look forward to the coming second semester. At the undergraduate level, I will be handling a subject at our college called Journalism Principles and Practice, and I will also be teaching Media Literacy in senior high. Teaching is a part-time engagement I love, and I enjoy every moment of it. In these subjects, there are core principles I discuss, among them journalism’s watchdog mandate.

Last Tuesday I wrote about a quiet kind of anti-corruption beyond outrage and protests. Things do not simply change because we are all shouting, “Ikulong na yan, mga kurakot!” The harder work begins when each of us learns to refuse the normalization of corruption and ineptness.

Thus, I mentioned that watchdog mandate of the news media as I extend the same anti-corruption theme to another institution we often treat as a moral substitute: the so-called Fourth Estate. We are a nation that leans too heavily on the Fourth Estate to do the heavy lifting of accountability. We act as if corruption can be reduced to a story that needs to be exposed, then to corrupt officials in power who need to be shamed, then to investigations and cases that need to be livestreamed and discussed constantly, and so on.

Yet, despite heroic Philippine newsrooms and brave and incisive journalism probing for leaked documents, outscooping the competition, and exposing the next viral thing, the hard, cold numbers do not flatter our faith on media’s watchdog role. We still rank 114 out of 180 and have a score of 33 out of 100 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2024. That score sits below the global average of 43, and the report notes that the global average has been stuck for years, with over two-thirds of countries scoring below 50. It also states that around 86% of our people think government corruption is a big problem.

This is not to blame our news media. This is to point out our tendency to outsource the anti-corruption fight to journalists. Because if corruption were merely hidden information, a free and robust press would have solved it for us long ago.

Corruption is, in sociological terms, power arranged as habit. It thrives not because nobody knows, but because too many people know and simply look the other way, finding it rational, or simply more convenient, to cooperate or play the game.

A free press helps, yes. Indeed, it is necessary, but it is not a game changer. We cling to the Western watchdog model as if it can stand on its own in our cultural and power setting. We admire the drama of Watergate and the myth of the crusading reporter, hoping that our news media will emulate the same values and invest in the same hardcore journalism.

Yet we do this without asking what made that kind of investigative journalism possible in the first place: stronger institutions, credible courts, reliable law enforcement, and a socio-political environment where violations carry consequences.

We rely on the media to do the heavy lifting when, in our material conditions, the media seems now just a puny, barking dog that is easily clobbered by big players, because those big players have the resources to own media outfits, buy their silence, or drown them out through troll networks and social media machinery. Many media companies are owned by business oligarchs, politicians, or religious organizations.

Media companies are still private companies. They need capital. They need advertisers. The nature of their business exposes them to lawsuits, regulatory harassment, and the simple economic reality that public interest journalism is expensive while viral noise is cheap. Today, the corrupt can hire their own “content creators” and mobilize sophisticated digital teams.

So when we say, “the media should expose corruption,” we might also be saying, “Let journalists take the risk, while the rest of us watch from the sidelines.” We ask the press to perform brave acts in a society that kills or renders penniless its heroes.

The Fourth Estate is not a substitute for our constitutional system of checks and balances. Corruption must be made shameful even before it becomes news.