POOLED EDITORIAL - The outer side

Do we mark the 17th Cebu Press Freedom Week on the outer side of the “Guttenberg Parenthesis”? The what? Over 19 centuries history of the press are compressed, by University of Southern Denmark academics, into this bracket.

The world’s first-ever “newspaper” is found on the outer side of  the  “Guttenberg Parenthesis,” namely: the 35-meter “Trajan’s  Column” in Rome.  Completed in 113 C.E., it reports Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian wars --- in bas relief, “an incredibly expensive to publish a story..” For centuries, thereafter, news was passed on orally or handwritten by scribes.

Until 1436 A.D. that is, using borrowed money, Johannes Gutenberg invented, in Germany, the first press that used moveable wooden letters. Books and newspapers proliferated over the next six centuries. This “Print Revolution” is at the "Guttenberg Parenthesis” center.

The 39 years since Ferdinand Marcos padlocked newspaper offices and broadcast stations is on the outer side of the "Guttenberg Parenthesis.” Marcos clamped on Proclamation 1081 to “save democracy.” Fourteen years of stark dictatorship followed. 

That would not be possible today because of the Digital Revolution that erupted.

The first inter-person communication, on Internet, came in 1971. And in 2001, Filipinos were first to wage People Power revolution using the new cellphones.  Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” and Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolt” featured new technology.  So did looters in London’s 2011 riots. They deployed Blackberrys to dodge  movements by  police.

No government today can confiscate all 78 million cell  phones that  Filipinos heft. (Compare that to 168.2 million Indonesian cell phone owners.)  About 29.7 million Filipinos are wired into the Net.  Chinese censors "firewall"  it’s 477.8 million Internet clients.

"Thirty years ago, there was no Internet, no cable TV, no online newspapers, no blogs," recalls Richard Posner in his book "Bad News." "The public’s consumption of the news used to be like sucking on a straw. Now it’s being sprayed like a firehose." Today, 24/7 news is the rule. 

 The uncertain “Arab Spring has been stoked by Twitter, Facebook, Ipods, etc.  All can have their say on the cyberspace expressway, often with a modicum of cross-checking.. This is the “Global Village” that Marshall McLuhan foretold ---- with a vengeance. This affects how our children see the world.

The new media today  can move truth—or falsehood— with the click of a mouse. “News organizations are abandoning the race to be the first to break the news,” the Economist notes. “(They’re) focusing instead on being the best at verifying"—the central function of journalism, specially in the  post Guttenberg era.

The new technology, radically recasts journalism’s tools. Electronics has whittled away, to cite one example, the traditional face-to-face oversight that editors exercised over reporters. There are few gate keepers left.

 Such changes do not occur in a vacuum.  This is a country where the needy, who number over 27 million, are often bought for a pair of sandals. 

Surveys also tell us today’s youngsters have hazy notions of the Marcos dictatorship. The insight of these future leaders, into what People Power wrested back, is tenuous. So is their sense of stewardship for nurturing restored freedoms.

We must resist the surge of  an  impatient journalism of assertion."Everyone is entitled to his opinion," the late Senator Pat Moynihan once said."But not everyone can have a different set of facts."More than ever, mainline and online journalists must insist on the discipline of verification.  

The journalist’s first obligation, then and now, is to the truth. That is the whole point about Press Freedom Week 2011.

These rites are about “the fine line we thread to honor a difficult past… the moral costs of both forgetting and remembering… searing moments that did injustice to lives that were lost or forever changes by brutal rulers, ” Columnist Ellen Goodman wrote.

“Remembering with undiminished intensity, over time, need not make us curators of our ancestors’ grievances,” she added.  “We can honor the past, without being trapped in it."