EDITORIAL: Historical Echoes of Media Bullying

Editorial Cartoon by Alfred Austin S. Cardillo

Journalism is vital in social equality. The common denominator of journalists is patriotism. Historical accounts evidently manifest the watchdog and developmental role of journalism all through the notable years of colonialism in the archipelago by Spain, Japan and the United States of America where Filipinos came to be no greater than slaves.

Likewise, in the course of the Marcos regime, journalists resisted the autocratic system and swerved the dreadful idea of death. Even Dr. Jose P. Rizal, the foremost national hero of our country, wrote journalistic-oriented manuscripts to fight for what the state truly deserved because he believed that it was the sole mechanism to fight against the malign fists of the offenders.

In contrast, greed of power is the crooks’ common ground. With the presence of the press, they cannot spontaneously execute their wanton agenda. Thus, the radical press should be dumped and only the ones who would bow down with no hesitation will be subject to their babysitting.

According to philosopher Karl Marx, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce—and what happened in recent months proved it dead-on.

The extraordinary result of the latest general elections earmarked catastrophic repercussions to the press. The famous rhetorical President Duterte and his cronies expressed their resentment of the press in public, pronouncing several malicious and baseless imputations of a crime including bribery and partiality. Even though the story was accurate and with backup data, the fanatics still found a way to negate the facts. The Facebook of Margaux “Mocha” Uson, a famous dancer, whose blog has nearly five million likes and followers claimed that her posts were more prevailing than the media institutions’ editorials combined.

For the media institutions directly affected, this dilemma is a misery in the making because it is, without any question, an attempt to impair the fourth estate and pathetically hoard more fanatics in the process. As a campus press, we no longer have to visualize how it is like to be wrongfully indicted because we also share the same predicament as what we have experienced recently.

Truly, media is under attack and being lethargic about it is offensive not just to journalism itself, but also to the people who once used it to free the next Filipino generations like Rizal. With the advent of technology, journalists should fight for the truth more than ever because fanatics have gone digital and lasciviously bred in it.

In the midst of this devastating status quo, journalists must be the ones who must shed light to this murky labyrinth. It is now the moral obligation of the journalists to defend the truth, recognize fiction from fake news and combat the lies. After all, democracy is futile without the free speech.