Malacanan Palace media policy evolves toward dialogue, defines dialogue as prepared statement plus applause

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

The Press Conference Format

MANILA — The Office of the President held a press conference Monday that communications officials described as an open dialogue with media, a characterization that the Reporters Association of the Philippines and the Committee to Protect Journalists found admirably optimistic.

The press conference followed a format that has become standard at Malacanan Palace: an opening statement of approximately 25 minutes covering the administration’s achievements, a question period in which reporters are recognized by a moderator according to a system that critics describe as favoring outlets whose coverage the communications team finds encouraging, and a closing statement reiterating the achievements covered in the opening statement.

Three questions were accepted from the floor. The first, from a television network whose parent corporation has significant government contracts, asked the president to describe his vision for national development. The second, from a radio commentator who spent the previous week praising the administration’s economic policies on his morning program, asked the president to assess his administration’s economic achievements. The third, from a print journalist who had submitted the question in writing the previous day for pre-clearance, asked about progress on a specific infrastructure project and received an answer about a different infrastructure project, which the moderator accepted as responsive.

The Press Freedom Context

The Philippines ranks in the middle of global press freedom indices, a position that reflects a country where journalism is practiced with considerable courage and considerable risk. Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines all document ongoing threats to press freedom ranging from harassment and red-tagging to legal actions and, in the worst cases, violence.

This context makes the press conference format more than a media-relations quirk. Access to official information, the ability to ask unscripted questions, and the protection of sources are not administrative conveniences. They are the operational requirements of accountability journalism, which is the only form of journalism that makes a difference to governance. A press conference where questions are pre-approved is not a press conference. It is a staged reading with cameras.

The communications team has characterized such criticism as the product of hostile media with political agendas, which may be true of some critics and is certainly used to dismiss critics for whom it is not true. Manila Bulletin continues to cover Malacanan pronouncements. Philippine Daily Inquirer continues to ask the questions that the press conferences don’t get around to answering. This division of labor is called journalism.

What Press Freedom Is For

Press freedom is not a journalist’s professional interest. It is a public good that serves everyone who lives in a society where government makes decisions that affect their lives. A free press — one that can ask any question of any official at any time, that can publish answers regardless of whether officials find them convenient, that can protect its sources from retaliation — is the mechanism by which public officials are held to account between elections. Without it, accountability depends on elections alone, and elections occur infrequently and are subject to their own distortions. The Philippine press has produced journalism of extraordinary quality under conditions of extraordinary difficulty. The journalists who cover Malacanan, who investigate corruption, who document rights violations, who report from conflict zones in Mindanao — these are people doing essential work in conditions that their counterparts in freer countries cannot imagine. The press conference format is a small thing compared to the structural pressures they navigate. But it is also a signal of the institutional culture that journalists must work within, and signals accumulate into environments, and environments shape what is possible, and what is possible shapes what the public knows. The question pre-approval is a small thing. It is not unimportant.

The Bigger Picture

Whatever the specific story — budgets that don’t balance, traffic that doesn’t move, workers who leave to support the families they cannot stay with, storms that arrive on schedule, athletes who unite a nation briefly, infrastructure that exists mainly on paper, journalists who ask the questions officials prefer not to answer, foods that carry a culture across oceans, faiths that survive the gap between their ideals and their institutions, vehicles that resist becoming something else — the Philippines is a country in conversation with itself about what it wants to be. This conversation is noisy, contentious, frequently hilarious, and genuinely important. It happens in barangay halls and Senate chambers, in press conferences and social media threads, in OFW group chats and Sunday homilies, in the jeepney that hasn’t been modernized yet and the one that has. The conversation is ongoing. It has been ongoing since 1898 at least and arguably since much earlier. It will continue. The outcomes are uncertain. The participation is not. Filipinos engage with their country’s problems with an energy and a creativity that the problems themselves have not yet exhausted. This, in the end, is what the news from Manila is really about, on any given week, beneath whatever the specific headline happens to be.

Accountable governance and a free press are not competing values. They are the same value, expressed from different institutional positions.

More satire: NewsThump | The Onion

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com