A dialogue with colleagues

CONSUMERS DEMAND!
Herman Tiu Laurel
9/19-21/2011



Reading the preview of OpinYon issue # 207, I found an irresistible urge to engage my fellow columnists in a dialogue on issues that I have long been dedicated to.

As these involve consumer and people issues--topics that essentially require a great deal of counter-information against the misinformation of mainstream media -- I deemed it fit to zero in on the subject of the OpinYon piece, “Media ownership and control in the PH,” lifted from www.waccglobal.com, with the author identified simply as “Ms. Coronel,” who, it turns out, I correctly assumed to be Sheila Coronel.

Media Monopoly
All told, media ownership in the Western world and in its Asian copycat, the Philippines, has been narrowing over the past decades. From Ben H. Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 2000), we quote:

“In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal… In 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine… In 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three… In 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever… (In 2000) AOL Time Warner’s $350 billion merged corporation (was) more than 1,000 times larger (than the biggest deal of 1983).”

And by the end of 2006, Mother Jones reported that only 8 giant media corporations dominated US media: Disney (market value: $72.8 billion); AOL-Time Warner ($90.7 billion); Viacom ($53.9 billion); General Electric (NBC, $390.6 billion); News Corp. ($56.7 billion); Yahoo! ($40.1 billion); Microsoft ($306.8 billion); Google ($154.6 billion).

Media Oligarchs
In the Philippines, the Lopezes, Prietos, Belmontes, Yaps, Cabangon-Chuas, Duavit-Gozon-Jimenez, and Pangilinan multi-media groups (or the Philippine media oligarchy) just about dictate the kind of information, infotainment, and entertainment content going around in media.

Then, of course, there’s the inutile state-run multi-media network consisting of the PNA wires, PTV 4 (is it still called that?), and its several AM/FM radio stations.

But at best, it merely represents a worst form of partisan political news that poses no competition to the uni-dimensional private and oligarchic mainstream media.

They’re uni-dimensional because they all present only one perspective to news and information, which is counter-educational, counter-informative, and counter-development; pro-oligarchy and pro-American; hedonist-consumerist; one that drowns people with misinformation, disinformation, and endless entertainment fare of absolutely no redeeming value; and one that dumbs down the nation (relative to our Asian neighbors).

When I was teaching mass communication and journalism at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), I would advise my students to “hold their horses” when boasting of Philippine media as “the freest in Asia,” which I often qualified only as “the freest that money can buy.”

Instead, I admonished them to be humble lest they imbibe the arrogance of the profession that claims to be the “powerful Fourth Estate.”

Peasant Freer than Newsman
I tell them: “The peasant who harvests his own rice and keeps it stored for the year is freer than any journalist who has to wait for his paycheck every 15th and 20th, or the next payola from the politico, corporate media officer, or jueteng lord.”

The 40 or so gruesomely murdered media practitioners in the Ampatuan massacre case were mostly there also for some pecuniary need for their families’ sustenance or their kids’ tuition.

I have long argued--and presented a bill in Congress--for a Media and Press Foundation (a la National Commission for Culture and the Arts) that should regularly get P100 million or so from the state in support of journalists’ basic social and security needs. But, it has languished there for 15 years!

Why, from 1999-2000 alone, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), with which Sheila Coronel was then involved, was able to get huge USAid funding for a series of anti-Erap investigative reports.

Now isn’t that a prime example of how so-called “independent” media can be so easily manipulated by funds?

Maverick Media
Ultimately, economic control is media control.

That is, except for mavericks who insist on going their own way whatever the odds, like I.F. Stone and his self-published anti-Vietnam weekly carrying his name, which proved pivotal in raising anti-war consciousness or, I’d like to believe, my Sulo ng Pilipino radio program.

As the world economy evolved into global oligarchism which, as a consequence, affected the national scene in many countries such as the Philippines, media concentration also accelerated.

If the proposed Cha-cha (Charter change) program--which has, as one of its aims, the opening up local media to foreign ownership--proceeds, we will see even worse media consolidation around a few global corporations, a situation as bad as, or even worse than, what we have today.

The only answer to this corporate consolidation of media is a populist state to support populist media--a dream waiting to happen once a genuine revolution gives it birth.

Lastly, as I had thought of eight colleagues to have my dialogue with, on subjects such as the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA); finance; climate change; among other things, I would like to include one more: Health.

Urine Therapy
Let me say kudos to OpinYon columnist Dr. Marilen M. Cruz for writing about “Urine Therapy” without the snicker and frown typical of quite a number of diploma-ed doctors.

Although I am not diabetic, I tried it for no other reason and found that it didn’t taste appalling.

I could even say that it works.

Well, as my health regimen includes never taking pain killers and antibiotics, and relying on real food for my nutritional requirements and supplements, that’s saying a lot.

But then, I’ve never been healthier today at almost 60 years of age than even in my teens.

(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8 on “The Agnotology of WTC Building 7”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)