Time to turn grief into strength

No story is worth a human life. This is what editors drill into their journalists covering the field, where hazards are many and risks to life and limb are for real.

It was not a single life that journalism lost a year ago in Maguindanao. The total count was 58; the body of the last one has yet to be accounted for. We are often haunted by the pained cry of mercy from journalists about to be dumped into the mass grave, their terror-stricken voices drowned by the roar of backhoes and sadistic jeering from their slaughterers.

One year later, journalists and those who trained in journalism but moved on into other fields, are still overwhelmed by a sense of loss.

But, after the expression of grief, what? Should we just say that “stuff happens” and that journalism is indeed a risky profession.

This is my proposal. Grieve we should. But after a year, let us now have this resolve to turn grief into strength. We all know this from our younger days — turning grief into strength.

The strength should be directed at helping journalists, not through ad hoc things but through institutional support. Such as:

• Establish a Legal Defense Fund for Journalists, especially for provincial journalists who are often left to fend for themselves in costly and thorny legal cases, in collaboration with the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and the Philippine Bar Association.

• Set up a public/private partnership to train and retrain journalists on craft enhancement, on new and emerging media trends based on ICT, on ethics and responsibility etc. I propose that a portion of the government proceeds from the sale of RPN 9 and IBC 13 should be the seed fund for the purpose.

• Major newspapers and media entities should revive the Philippine News Service (PNS) of the old, a cooperative-type, newsgathering operation that would generate jobs for journalists in the regions and in the provinces. The revival of the PNS would also prop up the news-gathering muscle of the major newspapers and media entities.

• Institutional efforts to guide and direct new media practitioners such as citizen bloggers, news patrollers on responsibility and ethics to prevent the use of such media by vested interests and for partisan gains.

• Develop a decent compensation scheme for provincial journalists to make them less vulnerable to temptations that may come their way.

On arming journalists and licensing their guns, I am really of two minds on this matter. Journalists are not really steeped up in the tradition of carrying weapons. They really live off the written and the spoken word.

And I cannot see how journalists — even those with licensed guns — can protect themselves from determined and deranged murderers.

I am calling on the entire journalism community to provide inputs on the tactics and strategies on how to turn this grief over the senseless loss of lives in Maguindanao into institutional support for journalists.

I know fully well that we can’t legislate against violence being inflicted on journalists. But the House committee on public information which I chair in Congress can use the inputs to do something positive for the journalism community and media practitioners from across the country.