Media and Estrada

When President Joseph Estrada inveighs against media and blames print and broadcast journalists for all his troubles, he may not be too far from the truth. Easy now. We are not saying he is not to blame at all. We are not saying Erap Estrada has been doing okay, except that media are out to get the president, come hell or high water -- an unfair media, a biased media, a hooded media. For that is what President Estrada has been saying all along. He says that for all the good that he does for the country, media -- representing the vested interests of the middle class -- are out to destabilize him and topple him from power.

This is where our thesis comes in.

And what we are saying is this: President Estrada took power in 1998 at a time that all the cards were stacked against him. A bleeding economy. Unprepared leadership. Media particularly, high tech media. The free press in a democracy, especially our kind of democracy, has more firepower than an invading army. There is a second and major consideration. The very slogan that catapulted Estrada to power was the slogan media pounced upon with a hungry tiger's relish. And drew blood. Erap para sa mahirap.

President Estrada and his advisers should have known that he could never remove poverty with a slogan, with a six-year term, with movie magic. Poverty needs decades, the wisdom of generations even to effectively address and resolve. Right now, 60 to 65 percent of the population consider themselves poor and very poor and the majority look at the future dismally and many blame the president. Erap para sa mahirap has become an albatross round the president's neck. He never should have given the poor this kind of hope.

It's not media's fault that he cannot deliver on this. He just can't.

There's something else about media today, differentiated from media 15 to 20 years ago. A generation ago, media plodded, walked with flippers, had no sense of today's urgency. Today, media are not only high-tech but equipped with a million electronic strobe lights to generate news on the instant -- 24 hours a day. Remember what Marshall McLuhan said? If he was effective and right in his day -- that was in the 60s -- the Canadian savant is even more frighteningly correct today.

McLuhan thoroughly probed media and came out with the conclusion that "it is the media, per se, not the information and ideas which they disseminate, that influence society." The invention of printing concentrated only on the eye, virtually obliterated other senses. May I add that the invention of television, cable television, whirling all over the world with satellite speed, not only held the eye, but the ear? Cellphones came and you had instant communication bridging great distances.

Relentlessly, high tech media pursued President Estrada as it had not pursued previous presidents before. Electronic floodlights were almost always in his face. What was before his biggest advantage, the camera, became the president's nemesis. In the movies, he had time to prepare, read his script, go into as many takes as the director decided, spool out to a hero's ending to the acclaim of millions of his fans. There were no warts, no blemishes. Today the TV camera is ruthless.

It sees him, it hears his every word, records his every mispronunciation, every verbal stumble, his contradictions, his difficulty with mental cohesion and clarity. Even that "exclamation point" campaign of a so-called rebellion of silence is cruel, sadistic. For the white exclamation point against a black background is slanted or tagilid. It is meant to depict the president's waddle walk or duck walk. The message, and this is where Marshall McLuhan comes in again, is that the president has a physical infirmity on top of his other defects.

When Ninoy Aquino was assassinated August 21, 1983, it took a week or so before the whole nation was able to know about it, digest it, react to it. There was hardly any TV in the provinces then and the state-controlled media deliberately sought to ignore the event. Ninoy's funeral, which drew two million mourners, a spellbinding spectacle which saw a nation bow its head in grief and anger, was given only eight seconds on Channel 4, the prime government TV network.

What I am saying is that during that period, communications hobbled. It took time before emotions could break out, before a nation could take a grip on what was happening, before passions could take wing. Today, in a matter of seconds or minutes -- one hour is already too long - Malacañang's pardon of Norberto Manero swifted to every town and village. So did the stock exchange scandal, the BW Resources stink-bomb, the president's imbroglio with SEC's Perfecto Yasay, his alleged intervention to succor a buddy by the name of Dante Tan.

In a matter of hours, Sr. Christine Tan became a folk heroine as she dropped the bomb that 74 percent of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office's earnings were allocated to the First Family, only a meager amount to the priority charity projects of the PCSO. Malacañang reacted in livid anger, went ballistic. Manoling Morato came forth to blacken the name of Christine Tan. Everything turned from bad to worse for Malacañang. Media immediately tuned in, recorded a feral-faced Morato savagely pouncing on a calm, serene, collected Sister Christine saying Mr. Morato had a "sick mind."

Print media, the metropolitan broadsheets, hardly ever function today as they did before.

Headlines today have a dynamite load. And so do the front-page stories. They are no longer the publications or newspapers or news agencies I used to work for. Reporting in my time was supposed to be neutral, balanced objective, strictly adhering to the who, what, where, when and how. Today there is a lot of show-biz and entertainment in the manner news is written. Even the objectivity of leads or the first paragraph is capsized for one-liners intended to amuse, entertain, startle, shock. News stories read more like slanted feature stories. Thus the word infotainment.

Editorials today read like columns. Columns read like editorials. Today's reporter must be aggressive, opinionated, entertaining. If he or she is not, his or her copy will be rewritten, reworded or restructured by a newsdesk whose main function is to get out a front page that has the roar and fury of OK Corral. And remember this. In all this charivari, media remain adversarial vis-à-vis the president and the government. Media are not out there to report that the trains run on time, schoolhouses are being built, irrigation dams are doing their duty, the markets are selling their products.

The front page, primetime on TV and radio, almost always behaves like short-range missiles zeroed in on government power. Where before corrupt governments could often conceal official skullduggery, cloak crooks in garments of the innocent, spray the air with deodorants and, of course, bribe some members of the media, democracy sees to it that freedom is the essential tool of media, no matter how that freedom might be misused sometimes or many times.

Another media tool, possibly its most formidable, even crushing tool is the national survey.

Today's main survey organizations are Social Weather Stations and Pulse-Asia. Both highly professional. And each time one or the other releases survey results, quarterly or monthly, the president and his government either cheer or quake, stumble or whistle gaily, croak, stammer, stutter, shiver and shake, thank their lucky stars. More than anything else, the national or metropolitan surveys of SWS and Pulse-Asia have done President Joseph Estrada in. Respondents are media-cultured.

Prior to and immediately after his occupancy of Malacañang, the president rode high on the surveys. The media then hadn't worked yet on the president. Media stood respectfully aside as Erap Estrada rode to power on a white stallion, cheered on by the multitudes especially the poor. Erap at the time still had magic and mystique, his every word listened to, his every gesture admired. Then media got to work. Didn't waste much time looking for presidential warts and blemishes, blunders and inconsistencies. Then media beat a tattoo the president could never extricate himself from. The tattoo of graft and corruption, cronyism, nepotism. The tattoo of his life-style, presidential advisers by the baker's dozen, the tattoo of midnight carousals of his Malacañang buddies.

What was only hinted at, spoken of in side whispers, was his private life. Media were not ready to take him up on that. There was the ominous smell of liberal and character assassination. It took Luis "Linggoy" Alcuaz, a character out of Pickwick Papers, La Boheme, to dramatize first the meaning of the Exclamation Point and afterward the extended presidential family. Linggoy mentioned wives and women, mansions built and mansions in construction, colossal amounts spent, new girl friends. He hinted all this gorged on public money.

With Linggoy, media rose again in an orange mushroom cloud.