Philippines should stop judging itself on 1 incident

What we have here, I think, is a series of unexpected and unfortunate outcomes in search of causes. Not as obvious are the unexamined prejudices — racial, political, personal, class, organizational, etc. — that have been activated, all searching for confirmation. The net result of all this has been an explosion of judgments, condemnations and calls for accountability, resignation, dismissal and reparation, based on a limited appreciation of the — facts.”

This is not peculiar to us Filipinos, though we do suffer from a tendency to think the worst of ourselves. This is just how the mass media reflect reality everywhere. The preference for disruptive and conflicting events is inherent to the system of the mass media. What is newsworthy is the bizarre, the unexpected and the scandalous. On the other hand, the normal, the ordinary, the routine and the overall consistency of everyday life merit little if any attention.

Let me say it differently, without minimizing the gravity of last Monday's tragedy, where eight innocent human beings died needlessly and in a very traumatic way. It is important to point out that on all the other days of the year, current and past, tourists have come to our country, typically enjoyed our people's hospitality, felt safe during their stay, and went home with only positive memories of their visit. In short, except for this single tragic incident, we know how to take care of our tourists. But this isn't worth reporting.

This kind of selectiveness is not maliciously motivated. It's just the way the mass media work. “Unrest is preferred to peace,” said Niklas Luhmann in his study of the modern mass media, “for reasons to do with the media designers' professional skills.” The problem is that the media do not control the meanings that its mass audiences give to the information they receive. We may often wish that media outfits would be more judicious or “responsible” in their reporting of events, or more sensitive to the possible effects of the information and utterances they make their viewers see and hear. This self-awareness could certainly be sharpened by the reiteration of ethical codes of professional practice. But, it is important to keep in mind, that the partial nature of the view of reality that media project is something that cannot be entirely avoided.

That is why the live coverage of an ongoing incident is always a precarious and risky business. Live television picks and projects images it can no longer take back. These are instantly seized upon by viewers and incorporated into their own existing framework of meanings. The opportunity to put these in context and, thus, somehow limit their meanings is crucially foregone by live reporting.

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