Storm the Gates

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Commenter Jeric (thank you for the visit) apparently saw (did you?) how miffed I was with certain lines of questioning posed to speakers at iBlog 4, specifically along the lines of the relationship of mainstream media and the blogosphere. What Jeric may not know is that this is something that has been been knocking about in my head for quite a while now, having come to a head (pun intended) that afternoon during the 2010 elections panel with Luz Rimban, Manolo, and Janette, reinforced once more by a comment made by John Nery in his Inquirer.net column "Newsstand" entitled "Blogs to Read".

So. This is the post where I am going to tell the blogosphere how pissed I am with a certain attitude that mainstream media seems to espouse.

In the same line of thinking, this is the part of the post where I tell off any casual visitor from traditional media and tell them to get out. Hey, folks, you can come back if you can deal with us bloggers with respect and rid yourselves of the derision for us console jockeys that you are quite effective in disguising with your "fair and accurate reporting".

Oh, and if you quote my content, you will be yet again be contradicting yourselves, wouldn't you agree? You will be taking from us the information that you have deemed yourselves the purveyors and gatekeepers of.

Intellectual whorage, what can I say. For now, however, get the eff out of my site.

Only bloggers can enter these gates.

(Not that I'm locking this post or anything -- you can still click through. Clicking through will only show what sort of manners you have, after having been so told.)

'Nuff said.

(Oh, and to my loyal readers -- yet again, the both of you three -- pardon the ramble. It's hard to write without enough coffee.)

***
When I was younger, I thought that journalism was one of the coolest professions one could aspire to, and for quite a while I dreamed about writing for the a reputable broadsheet or taking photographs in some far-flung nook of the country. (Of course, it didn't work out that way and I became an engineer instead, but that is neither here nor there.)

In the late Nineties right through the early Noughties, my addiction to the nightly news and those TV news magazines, and I thought that the talking heads were doing the public a great service. At the time I held in relatively high esteem Frankie Evangelista, Mel Tiangco, Teddy Locsin, jr., Loren Legarda, Noli de Castro, and other such journalists, as I did columnists such as Adrian Cristobal, Conrado de Quiros, Ceres Doyo, Dean Jorge Bocobo, Amando Doronila, Ninez Cacho-Olivares, Neal Cruz, and Rina Jimenez-David, among others. To this day I still do (well, some of them, at least).

As the 21st century rolled in, I was impressed that some journalists banded together and decided to establish the website of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and marveled at the vibrancy of its blog. I recall thinking at the time how exciting the possibilities had become, that with the public offering its almost real-time feedback and analysis, journalism had become more interactive, even more so than the limited space that the letters to the editor and listeners' feedback airtime used to provide. At the time, I had thought that mainstream media had finally begun to go more grassroots, that ordinary citizens were beginning to be part of the common search for truth and information.

When the blogging phenomenon began to grow in leaps and bounds in the local and international arena, I likewise began to adopt the concept of concept of citizen journalism -- cautiously, yes, but generally positively. I noted the advent of outfits such as OhMyNews, and during the 2007 elections I thought that the Philippine blogosphere could contribute in the dissemination of information to the public, albeit with a few snags hindering bloggers for the moment. Events such as the Glorietta blast showed me how the media could benefit from the involvement of the public, such as first-hand reports and even scientific analysis of the event, so much so that I answered so generally favorably to a reader who asked for an opinion.

Lately, however, I have been made aware that mainstream media does not generally look favorably at the Philippine blogosphere, whether on our existence per se or insofar as reportage is concerned. Korina Sanchez' coverage entitled Beware of the Blog had guests who made digs at the credibility of bloggers by making a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" (?) bloggers. In iBlog 4 (as I had early spoken of) I was displeased when it seemed clear to me indeed did mainstream media have a way of looking at itself (something along the lines of mainstream media being the "gatekeepers of information") that magnified a seeming disdain for the blogosphere. Reading John Nery's column titled Blogs to Read had this gem that, in my view, summed it up:

The discussion ranged widely, from the loss of traditional media's gate-keeping function to the make-or-break importance of trust or credibility.

As well as this:

I got the impression, especially after the show, that some of my colleagues in the so-called mainstream media find the so-called blogosphere a threatening thicket, a tangled web best avoided.

Three points, to my way of thinking, are worthy of discussion: first, mainstream media being "gatekeepers" of information; second, the credibility of the blogosphere as a whole and that of opinion bloggers at large; and third, the "threat", that mainstream media believes, posed by the blogosphere to mainstream media. A minor, follow-up point would be the view that mainstream media would rather avoid the blogosphere as much as it can, if it can do so.

The first point -- mainstream media as "gatekeepers of information" -- gives me a rather disturbing impression, that of mainstream media allowing only the sort of informaton that it determines worthy of public interest to be published. It seems to me that such a viewpoint blurs the distinction between reportage and propaganda, insofar as 1) giving high importance to issues that are popular (which may not be the same as that of public interest) and 2) shaping public opinion by choosing which issues are hyped and which are ignored. The vicious cycle then is formed; this can be seen with the hyped-up reportage on Marian Rivera's topless role in Dyesebel, making the public hungry for more of such reports, thus spurring mainstream media to report more on Marian Rivera's unclothed mammaries. This reportage wastes airtime on issues that are far more insidious and affect each Filipino directly, such as corruption in government, wastage of tax monies, attacks on civil and political rights, and so on.

The argument is that mainstream media outfits are businesses out to make a profit, with the equation lurid stories = ratings = profit, and since the public is generally more interested in Marian Rivera's breasts than they are with the thieving in the administration, it is only good business sense to spend more time reporting on the seminudity of Marian Rivera than by, say, the NBN-ZTE deal. Fine; business is business. With that said, however, it would then be dissimulation for mainstream media to say that they are truly providing public service, in terms of educating the public and providing information that would lead to people making informed choices; I cannot for the life of me understand how knowing about the size, shape, and state of Katrina Halili's pulchritude will help me become a better citizen of this republic.

Such is the vicious cycle, and I am now fairly certain that mainstream media has not attempted to break the paradigm: feed the public crap so often that they get addicted to it, and when the public gets addicted to crap give the public what they want. Ratings are higher, coverage is cheaper (as it would be more costly to cover news in far-flung provinces than it would to cover metropolitan T&A), and so profits are bigger.

But deeper into the issue of the gatekeeping of information -- who says that mainstream media has the monopoly on the reportage of current events? After the Glorietta blast, various eyewitness accounts appeared on the blogosphere, supported heavily by the current technologies of cellphone cameras and video, so much so that mainstream media could be said to have been scooped. Everyone with a cellphone that has camera, and has an internet connection, could very well take a video of an event that happens and report the occurrence on YouTube, without waiting for the possibility of it being aired on TV (if the networks deem the event worthy of airtime).

Juned remarked in iBlog4 that it is the message that is valuable, and it matters not who was able to cover it, and with this I am in agreement. Luz Rimban did say in iBlog4 that come the 2010 elections, traditional media outfits will send its camera crews and reporters to "the usual places" and to the "usual candidates", thereby creating a void in the reportage of events that will need to be filled. Will traditional media make the attempt all by themselves? It seems that that would be unlikely; if we go by the 2007 elections as a template, the reportage was not sufficiently balanced -- major coverage was such that the Team Unity vs. the Genuine Opposition issue was treated similar to a boxing title card, with nuisance candidates were treated as comic relief, and other candidates given only lip service, if not ignored completely. Rimban then mentioned that bloggers will very likely step up to fill this need that traditional media will be unable to do, and with this I likewise agree.

However, this poses the question that mainstream media seems to stress: are bloggers credible, so much so that they can be trusted to report fairly? From where I am sitting, I think it disingenuous that traditional media outfits would even dare ask that, considering that these same traditional media outfits have among them entertainment reporters (parse that statement as you will). Perhaps we do not have the legmen to be able to fact-check and "get the other side" of the story; fine, so what? If we take a photograph of someone wearing candidate's "vote for me" vest a slipping a Ninoy to someone wearing a COMELEC ID badge near a voting precinct, would that note suffice as a story? If we spot a group pasting posters on a "post no bill" wall and take a video, is the video less credible because it was shown on YouTube and not on GMA7 or Inquirer.net? If a video of a shootout at some town in Maguindanao involving known supporters of candidates is taken by a cellphone surfaces on YouTube, would it be less newsworthy than if it was taken by a camera crew and aired by the network?

My point is this: in this age of information and user-generated content, for traditional media to keep believing that only they have the right to purvey information to the public and that they alone should "own" the content to provide credibility is arrant nonsense. A raw video or photograph taken by a citizen blogger is information no less as valuable nor is less credible than that taken by a traditional media practitioner; the information itself provides credibility.

(Of course, I understand how it stings journalists when they've been scooped -- probably even more so if it is a non-journalist who report the story first. Is that the reason why journalists would rather that bloggers be thought of as without credibility? Heh.)

Perhaps that is the threat the blogosphere poses to mainstream media, as traditional media outfits believe -- that traditional media outfits may begin to lose their hold on the public, given that just about anyone with a cellphone camera and a DSL connection can report on an event. Perhaps traditional media thinks that they will lose their relevance; an unfounded belief, I am certain, as columnists are generally respected by opinion bloggers (with the exception, perhaps, of Belinda Olivares-Cunanan and the showbiz columnist crowd haha). Perhaps that is why traditional media is afraid of the blogosphere -- that there just might be a blogger out there who is far more surgical in his analysis than those appearing on news magazine shows.

I still hold on to the belief that there can by synergy and cooperation between mainstream media and the blogosphere, especially because of the growing limit to the ability of mainstream media to cover as much ground as the blogosphere can, and the inexorable increase of bloggers -- taken as an aggregation of individuals reporting on so many topics (call it the information equivalent of the "long tail" model). However, if mainstream media is wary of bloggers and would avoid the blogosphere as much as they can, then fine -- I doubt if we bloggers would desist from offering to cyberspace our content. It would then be intellectually dishonest for mainstream media to come get our content, they being wary of us, simply because they cannot get the same content anywhere else, and then deride bloggers as lacking of credibility.

(On the other hand -- and I hope that Noemi will bear this out -- I am rather displeased by the quite-often inaccurate -- and sometimes blatantly unfair or uncalled-for -- coverage of bloggers that mainstream media does. That said, I think it is a good thing that we have our blogs, fora, and websites where we can tell the rest of cyberspace and the blogosphere which reporters have treated us badly, so that if our turn comes, we can avoid them ourselves. Doing a reenactment without permission? Screw you, mainstream media!)

Let me phrase that another way: the blogosphere will only be a threat to mainstream media if traditional media outfits are selfish enough and arrogant enough to believe that they alone are the honest purveyors of information. My view is that we bloggers are no less credible than traditional media practitioners -- and likewise no more so than they (we do have analysts in the blogosphere as well as those who write in the same manner as those who write for your entertainment pages).

The minor point that mainstream media would avoid the blogosphere as much as they can should be dealt with in a likewise minor manner -- if you don't want to get our content, don't get our content. We know about the scrapers among you, however; talk about eating the crap that you just blooped out.

All in all, this much is what I'd like to tell the my fellows in the Philippine blogosphere -- let's not stop what we're doing, and if mainstream media wants to marginalize us with their undercurrent of derision, let them. The long tail model is catching up with traditional media outfits, and if they can't get with the times, well, that's their lookout. Let's put our content out there, as honestly as we can; our credibility hinges not on which big-name media outfit we belong to but to the quality of our content.

Remember, each of us has a voice. Each of our opinions has value. Let nobody -- especially the media juggernaut -- convince you otherwise.

***
On another note, I am rather disappointed with how sloppy the fact-checking Inquirer.net is getting. Consider this:



iBlog4 was held in Malcolm Theater, in Malcolm Hall. The UP Law Center is in Bocobo Hall, and is another place entirely.

Well, maybe I shouldn't be surprised -- after all, apparently they discovered a new country.

Tee hee.

***
Anyway, sorry about the long unplug, folks. Been busy, and still am.

I'll be back soon enough (and yes, I still will write about stuff I want to, whether or not they appear on mainstream media).

Later, all.



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