The term social justice is all-embracing, almost limitless because we append the word "social" to justice which we know is not an abstraction, particularly in our country. Social, meaning society in general? Meaning the behavior of people? Social meaning every aspect that pertains to being sociable, or being up there in the upper classes?
Let me define injustice, then, as we in this unhappy country know it – rather than justice.
If social justice pertains to society, to a community and its institutions, then injustice is the absence of justice in that society. We are familiar with it: when a man cannot have three meals a day, that is unjust. When a sick Filipino – with all our nurses and doctors and excellent modern hospitals – dies because he cannot afford medicines or medical services – that is injustice. When a person is jailed or is sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, when children cannot go to school, because parents cannot afford to send them there, these are injustices.
In 1986 when 20 farm demonstrators were killed at Mendiola because a Filipino president refused to see them, when farmer demonstrators are shot at the gates of Hacienda Luisita – and there is no outrage against that crime – when a jobless man feeds his two children with recycled garbage and they die, when thousands of our college graduates work abroad as housemaids, or even as prostitutes…
All these are injustices that cry for redress.
Having defined social injustice, it is easy then for us to define the opposite, which is justice and media – meaning television, radio, newspapers and all the latest technologies that purvey information. But there is something awry about the connective, "and" – media and social justice should be a partnership? Between media and a just society? Man and wife? Business and pleasure? Partners in crime, perhaps?
I would rather that the title be Media for Social Justice. This would mean advocacy, even a commitment, if that is at all possible, to social justice.
What miniscule tradition we have in journalism attests to the steadfast writing of Filipinos on social political issues. We can start with that famous fortnightly, La Solidaridad, which Marcelo H. del Pilar edited in Spain’s Propaganda Movement, Rizal – on to Mabini.
The flowering of our Spanish literature – Jose Palma, Manuel Bernabe Cecilio Apostol, Jesus Balmori, writing in the Spanish newspapers of the period – the Tagalog stalwarts, Lope K. Santos, Alejandro G. Abadilla, and on to our English writers, Carlos P. Romulo, Salvador P. Lopez, Federico Mangahas, Rafael Roces Jr., Arsenio Lacson, Raul Manglapus, Teodoro M. Locsin, Indalecio Soliongco, Renato Constantino and on to Nick Joaquin. Generations of Filipino writers in all our languages have pleaded for social justice, equated this ideal with their sense of nation as well.
Indeed, as the cultural critic Bienvenido Lumbera has succinctly stated, our vernacular literatures – and journalism – are most certainly characterized by searing social criticism.
To oppose injustice? What a tremendous, crippling challenge this now becomes to media because we all know that in a consumerist capitalist society, media are there to make a profit – that ugly word which, after all, is the logic of capitalism.
But we also subscribe to certain humanist ideals kono: that journalism is not just a profession, it is a vocation, like the priesthood, medicine, teaching – we are in it because we also want to serve, with integrity if at all possible, although we know that we cannot have integrity for breakfast.
If this objective of media is acceptable, then we can look at the Philippine media and measure their effectivity, their validity even against the injustices that prevail in this country.
We see them everywhere in media the criminals not just in government but in the highest reaches of private life, in business. Has media exposed these criminals? The rapists who ravage the environment, the laws, who steal from the people, who profit by selling inferior and fake goods, who send their money abroad instead of investing it here to provide us with more jobs, so that our workers need not leave particularly our women, college graduates who, by the thousands, take demeaning jobs.
When media play up the profligate magnificence of the rich, they do not promote social justice – instead, they abet the social irresponsibility of the upper classes. When media parade the cronies of Marcos and all those who helped him in his plunder of this country, media hold up the wrong role models for media then magnify, glorify the crimes against the people by those looters.
When media prohibit the criticism of big business, particularly those who send their money abroad instead of investing it here, then they, too, fail to serve their own nobler goals.
When media do not follow the case of activists who disappear or who are silent about the killing of such people, then media are accessories to the commitment of injustice against the people.
How best to serve social justice, to present social issues to the grassroots? The big newspapers dominated by big business and hobbled by national politics seldom concern themselves with the problems of small people, the provincianos, it falls on the community newspapers, the provincial radio stations to do this.
I remember Ermin Garcia of Pangasinan and his crusading spirit.
If you travel to the north, through the North Highway, once you get to Pangasinan, you tune in the local radio stations; if you understand Ilokano you will hear the local broadcasters talk about child psychology, folk culture, international politics; all these are interspersed with local news and problems which are then almost immediately answered, not necessarily with palliatives, but with explanations.
This rootedness in local problems is not an Ilokano phenomenon but is very much evident all over the country, for which reason, several broadcasters have been assassinated. And the government has done little to bring to justice the assassins. And why not? Because government is in the hands of such people that condone, or perhaps, are behind these assassinations.
If we have not exposed them through media, have we ostracized them? This is one powerful instrument of media – shame them, deny them access to where they can flaunt their ill-gotten wealth.
But are we, ourselves, capable of ostracism?
Why do our media feature them? Why are their bloated, grinning faces on our front pages? Of what use really are so-called society pages? Talk shows glorifying these scoundrels?
In so many media fora, the publishers and owners of these media conglomerates are never held culpable for the corruption in their ranks – a corruption of which they are fully aware.
On the more practical side, charity begins at home. Some owners of media are niggardly when it comes to paying their employees – particularly their frontline people, the reporters in the field who are most vulnerable to bribery and to threats. They should be paid well – and they should also be fired and not merely reprimanded when they succumb to bribery.
Let me cite the example of the late Raul Locsin, winner of the Magsaysay Award for Journalism and publisher of Business World. His reporters did not refuse the envelopes handed to them; their contents were funneled to charitable organizations and the receipts were then given to the donors.
Media enterprises that are used as tax dodges, propaganda vehicles or simply weapons to protect vested interests should, more than the legitimate media, pay their field people a living wage.
The frontiers of media are continuously expanding, covering entire populations, helping topple tyrannical regimes. How did Ayatollah Khomeini reach Iran from his exile in Paris? Through thousands of taped messages broadcast to the Iranian people in a manner that eventually exploded into the revolution that toppled the Shah. Today, the Internet, websites, blogs – even the cellphone and text messages – carry information wider, faster than ever before, alerting people not just to personal gossip, but to worldwide events that could change their lives.
It is difficult to censor these – as is now happening in China and in those countries where repressive regimes still exist.
Events are now recorded where they occur, with speed, not just by the global networks but by ordinary people with video cameras. It is no longer a matter of information not being broadcast, but how this glut of information and knowledge can alter human behavior, governments even, so that justice will prevail.
The purveyors of information are continually in flux; new technologies impact on the senses – but the old verities of integrity and justice most of all will always be constant.
If media are to be truly analytical as all those engaged in investigative journalism must be, then media should also know the root cause of such injustices.
Perhaps the least understood origin of such is the absence of a sense of community, of nation among us – the fact that we became a state before we developed as a nation. How then is this sense of nation created?
Media must know how to nurture it and help it grow.
The world abounds with examples of how poor, feudal countries modernized, became democratic states because they had this sense of nation and were able to resolve their internal contradictions, weld their diverse peoples together to become strong citizens.
But how to do this will have to be the subject of yet another forum, more soul searching. If media are for truth, then media should always operate with the principle that truth is justice in action.