An Appeal to Media: Cover More than the Theatrics

Pass to media people you know...

An Appeal to Media: Cover More than the Theatrics
Joy Aceron

There is now a growing perception that street demonstrations are “quick fix” and “unintelligent” course of actions to resolve political issues. This is particularly evident about the reactions of some people about “people power,” which is being narrowly construed as nothing but nuisance, rabble-rousing and an impatient solution to the political crisis.

There are many reasons for this negative opinion about street protest actions, but the one that posts a significant influence is media coverage. On a varying level, what is seen on television, heard on radio and read on papers about societal actions are largely just the street demonstrations, particularly the theatrics: confrontation with the police, burning of effigies, wild antics, ironic combination of politicians and other attention-grabbing drama.

However, what the public does not know that should be told is that these groups and forces that are involved in street protests are doing a lot more than just being in the streets shouting their demands to the government. In fact, street protests, among the wide variety of societal actions, are probably where the least time and resources are spent.

The groups that are now active in protest actions in response to the political crisis under the current administration— the mass-based organizations, some leftist groups and some few middle class collectives—have consistently been involved in the painstaking tasks of organizing and education, bringing to as many people the forums and venues to know and discuss the issues that face the country. In order to exchange ideas, build consensus and broaden their impact, they build coalitions and networks, which is not an easy task involving unending debates because of the differences in perspectives among the organizations, groups and individuals in their group. They conduct research studies, build their database and publish reading materials particularly popular education materials about the issues they tackle. They engage the government, the business sector and other civil society groups in policy dialogues. Their partner non-government organizations would even undertake projects that provide direct services to their communities.

Because of their usually critical stance towards the government and their radical or progressive disposition, they do their work with the threat of repression and violence. Resources are always lacking, especially for those whose political work is a full-time job, hence, hardly there is comfort nor complacence. For the majority who has work outside of the protest actions, there is always the need to work double and triple time to balance the demands of their “profession” and the demands of the social movements. Largely the sacrifices are charged to love of country, service to the people and all those which are rhetorics to many, but something concrete and alive to these people.

Street protest actions are being done as part of the multi-faceted approaches to their advocacies that address fundamental and systemic problems of the country. This is usually just a venue for the different coalitions and networks to converge and bring their sentiments to a broader public, including those who hold public office. There are street demonstrations that are spontaneous where unexpected turn of events elicits strong emotional response that brings groups and unorganized individuals alike to converge in one place and exercise their freedom of expression, like EDSA 1. There are street protests and mass actions that are planned largely to show solidarity and send a message to a larger audience through the media.

The information that must be widely disseminated is that there are more to it than just mere street demonstrations. Street demonstrations are not quick fix and unintelligent societal actions. Behind it are critical analyses, long-lasting solutions and sustained actions. People power therefore is not just the coming out of groups and individuals to the streets. It involves the immense and sustained work of wielding the interest and imagination of the people and social forces to collectively engage and influence the outcome of public issues and concerns that affect the country. Behind the chants are heated debates, deep reflections and analyses. Behind the march are sweat and blood of people who take communal actions because of their shared beliefs and principles.

For the public to understand and appreciate the over-all work of the social forces, the media, which serve as the main source of information by most people, have to go beyond the theatrics. Not doing so will continue to put in bad light street protest actions and will disregard the more important work of the social movements.

This demand is probably difficult because it is the theatrics that have audience. It is popularly more interesting and perhaps even entertaining to many. The challenge however is: isn’t the media supposed to be balanced and truthful? Telling the public the whole picture of societal actions, or at least the more substantial part of it, will not only give justice to the work of the social movements, but will also give justice to the role that the media is supposed to play in society, which should go beyond what sells.

Joy Aceron
Lecturer, Political Science Department, Ateneo de Manila University
Research Fellow, Ateneo School of Government
Masters in Public Administration, University of the Philippines- Diliman
joyaceron@yahoo. com

Team RP Press Statement: On the Makati Rally

TEAM RP PRESS STATEMENT
March 5, 2008


ON THE MAKATI RALLY


"We are disappointed over what happened during the rally in Makati last Friday, February 29, 2008. Allowing politicians to go on stage and speak in behalf of and to the crowd did not only misrepresent our convictions, but was primarily a breach of the agreement between the organizers and participating groups that no politician should be seen on stage.

"We pulled out earlier than expected because we believe that our no-politicos agreement should have been binding enough and that no individual or group was above that agreement, the same way we believe that no one is above the law.

"Friday proved that people of different beliefs and opinions can rally under the same banner and share a common goal. We are together in this fight for Truth, Accountability and Reforms in government, anchored on genuine democracy where transparency, dialogue and the rule of law are immutable and non-negotiable.

"But we disagree that politicians, with whatever fame they have or had, truly symbolize our sentiments. Likewise, we believe that in order to make the greater majority of the public realize that politics should not be personality-based, opinion leaders themselves should veer away from the traditional approach of building up personalities as icons of change.

"We look forward to the day when not only are our public officials held accountable to the people, but more importantly, that we, as a nation, value the honor of word and the promises we make.

"In our pursuit of Truth, Accountability and Reforms, we are also putting forth our convictions against traditional political trade, be it in government or civil society, which has tolerated, if not contributed to having a culture of corruption.

"A search for truth requires critical discussion and knowledge of facts and issues, not opinions or political statements from personalities. We disagree that the means justify the end; else we would be just like what we are fighting against."


Signed:



Chairman - Harvey Keh
Vice-Chairperson for External Affairs - Atty. Eirene Aguila
Vice-Chaiperson for Internal Affairs - Nina Terol
Membership Committee Head - Stephanie Cuevas
Communications and Public Relations Head - Niel Lim
Finance Committee Head - Steve Ladan
Secretariat and House Rules Committee Head - Ryan Chung
Special Projects Committee Heads - Karen Naranjo and Alvin Quintans
Truth Committee Head - Eli Convocar

Acccountability Committee Head - Princess Celestino
Reform Committee Heads - Marie Chris Cabreros and Gio Tingson

http://teamrp.multiply.com/

Team RP is a youth-led movement that is composed of college students and young professionals from all walks of life that is currently pushing for Truth, Accountability and Reform in our government. Team RP is also part of the BUSINA movement or Buong Bayan Isinisigaw Tama Na, Itama Na! Team RP believes that our decisions and actions should focus on the prevailing issues and problems at hand and not just on personalities and political figures. Team RP also believes in developing and implementing concrete action plans towards achieving its goals of promoting Truth, Accountability and Reform in our present-day Filipino society. As a youth-led movement, we believe that complaining about our country's present situation and problems is not enough, rather proactive and collective action by every Filipino is a must if we hope to move forward as a nation and as a Filipino people.



For more information about Team RP, please email us at team.rp.official@gmail.com or you can also call us at (02) 426-5657.

an interesting article about the youth today

FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH: THE LOST GENERATION http://www.pcij.org/i-report/3/filipino-youth.html

Finding Spaces

They are the hi-tech generation, at ease with technology but otherwise lost when it comes to dealing with the complexities of a globalized world.

by KATRINA STUART SANTIAGO


TOO OFTEN the Filipino youth is viewed with the conventional eyes of our elders: we are the future of the nation, we are the agents of change. The government counts on us to help save the country, civil society exhorts us to be vigilant, the media remind us often enough that we are the hope of the nation. For the most part, however, they are disappointed. Especially when it's convenient, we remain incomprehensible to our elders, and it's easy to see why.

We are the high-tech generation, adept at computers and cellphones, but unable to communicate well without a keypad or a clicking mouse. Our relationships are characterized by, even built on, text messages and electronic mail, impersonal as these may be. We conspire with piracy and free Internet downloads with gleefully open eyes, morality and ethics aside. We sit before our computers to find ourselves, if not in writing, then in creating websites, or in looking for jobs, friends, a community we might belong to. For many of us, our computers are our best friends, personal extensions where our work, our studies, our lives are conducted -- if not created and re-created -- as frequently as we find the need for it, which is quite often.

Our dependence on computers and cellphones is not only an indication of our aptitude for high-tech tasks and processes, it's also an indication of our need for something we can hold on to, something that somehow defines us, and only us. We love being incomprehensible to our elders because of this technology, and we revel in it. Unfortunately, a lot of the time we also reveal our incapability at discernment, as we unthinkingly forward ill-informed text messages or emails, upload pictures on the Internet without realizing the probability of its distribution, take stolen videos with our phones and think nothing of it. We have a hard time deciding whether something is right or wrong, dangerous or not; worse, we are unable to discern just what role technology is playing in our lives, or why it has become so important to us.

This lack of clarity about the things that define us may be the only thing that we of this generation have in common. Born in the late 1970s to early 80s to possibly activist or hippie parents, or to the straight conservative ones who stayed aloof of either extreme, ours is a generation that can't seem to find a reason for its existence. At least our activist parents had the Left to believe in and the Marcos regime to struggle against; our hippie parents had the liberation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to live up; our conservative parents had the Church and the institution of family to hold on to. By comparison, we are faced with nothing but the dregs of these institutions, now all unstable, often unintelligible, usually in the process of compromise. It's practically a nonspace of resistance and liberation, with uncertain enemies and even less certain ideologies to back us up.

Not that all of us are having a difficult time finding the right spaces within which we may exist, if only to survive. Cheap labor and globalization have brought us the call centers where half our youth are employed, changing their biological clocks, messing up relationships, and creating demand for 24-hour McDonalds and Jollibees in the strangest street corners. A small percentage of the other half are selfemployed, given rich parents who are only too happy to put up seed money and get their kids started on the capitalist course. Others with moneyed parents have the luxury of doing volunteer and NGO work, moved as they seem by a need to "give something back to the country" without necessarily seeing the big picture in which rich (probably their) families are the oppressors. Many are still part of the Philippine Left, confusing as that label has become, in all its denominations. At least those of us who are part of the different leftist movements have a better sense of what ails this country, even when we have to go from simple terms like poverty and corruption to the abstract levels and jargon of imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and fascism.

But so many more of the youth have left, or are set to leave. Our prospective teachers, doctors, nurses are on a constant exodus to different parts of the world, with a small middle to upper class percentage leaving in disgust what they think is a sinking boat. The bigger chunk of those who say goodbye though are of the lower classes, and they're the ones who say that they shall return, when they've ensured their futures with the dollars they will earn.

BUT MOST, if not all of us, are at a loss. It's not clear why we're living our lives the way we do, doing the things that occupy us. There's always a sense of uncertainty, not about the future, but about the present: What exactly are we doing? Why is this what we do? Whereas the generation before us always had a sense of a future -- with family, with career, with house and lot and what-have-you -- we are always looking at a future that's closer to the present, where we may finish our studies, find a job, write a book, or just simply see the month's end and decide then what's next.

This is not to say that we aren't enjoying ourselves, uncertainties and all. Thanks to the fruits of our hippie and activist parents' labors, we live at a time when there's freedom in the music we hear, the books we read, the television shows and movies we watch. We are liberated from the strict rules of the Church and the institutions of family, school, and employment. Freed from the stereotypes our parents rebelled against, we think nothing of reconfiguring our roles to suit our needs. We are redefining relationships as often as we redefine ourselves -- literally with vanity, or figuratively with spiritual or religious beliefs, and the next hip ideology. Homosexuality in all its dimensions has become our norm. Easily accessible organic herbs, designer drugs, and expensive alcohol are inanimate friends we can count on. And then there's the sexual freedom we are heir to, which most of the time we abuse, misuse, and unthinkingly tie our lives around. Our liberation, handed down as it was, has become the freedom we can't quite live up to. We wear what we want, we can be what we want, and do as we please. But that doesn't mean we're actually doing something. For the most part, we are easily satisfied with ourselves, and that's where the problem lies. We can do volunteer work for an NGO by day and party with abandon by night without feeling conflicted-we deserve it, we think, because we're doing something for the country. We can sit at a café all day and talk about what ails our lives, our relationships, our country, and think that this is productive. We go to a token rally "for the truth to come out" and imagine ourselves socially relevant. We look at EDSA 2 and think: hah! that was my doing, without a sense of what it has truly brought this country, which isn't much.

FOUR YEARS ago, tasked to teach critical thinking and the essay to college sophomores eight to 10 years my junior, I decided that the only way they could learn to think critically would be to show them where exactly they were coming from, and where they should speak from, given the state of the nation. I wanted to help them realize that in everything they said, did, or thought, they were speaking, doing, and thinking as Filipinos, whether they liked it or not. With that realization would come the responsibility not just to speak as Pinoys and Pinays, but to be Pinoys and Pinays in their analysis of everything from soap operas to foreign critical theories, from current events to the clothes they wear.

Of course given that we all, young and old alike, continue to be messed up about our identity as a people, I could only ground them in certain realities about our country that we manage, consistently, not to confront. Realities that we keep in check because we can, since we are not directly burdened. The most basic of these that needs to be acknowledged, I found, is the fact that we are an impoverished country, never mind that we're driving the newest cars, or that we have the latest cellphones, or that we are not the poor. It does not mean that everybody else is as well-off -- because not a whole lot are. Only upon realizing this can we raise the question: Why are we poor? A question that can only be answered by history, hopefully a Constantino history, which tells of how we have been oppressed for centuries and by what, and how we have always fought back.

A SENSE OF history is a good beginning, I believe, for those of us in this generation, students and teachers alike, seeking a reason for our existence at this point in time. Because we may be hi-tech and all, free to make life choices, and liberated in the way we dress, think, and do things, but in truth, we are misplaced and displaced by a lack of consciousness about where we truly come from in the context of the country we irrevocably belong to. When the poverty is acknowledged, our enemies become obvious. Ours is a long history of governance that has not had the interests of the majority of this country in mind, allowing globalization to eat us alive, allowing the elite to continue owning more and more of this country's money and natural resources for themselves, allowing booty capitalism to prosper at the expense of the poor and hungry majority. And then there's us, the educated middle class, some of whom choose to remain complacently uncertain about what we may do, and some of whom choose to take off, in search of happier spaces.

But the space we search for can only be here, in the one country we are born to and can truly call ours. Whatever we do, whether we're leaving or staying, taking to the streets for the masses or going to the countryside and joining the armed struggle, whether we're writing in English or living up the Filipino language, teaching in a university or answering complaints at a call center, we make our decisions in the context of the state of this nation, as we know it. This is all the space we need, and the space where we are most needed. We only need to know enough to see it.

Meanwhile, we wander among the spaces we create and wonder what it will take to knock some sense into our heads about the changes we have the power to effect. Quite possibly, we are a generation doomed to an endless process of searching -- in denial about this country's truths, not ready to give up our lives for the bigger battles, uncertain of what exactly it is we can do. Probably, we are a transition generation, finding and making spaces in the strangest of places -- be it in the technology we so love or in the bars of Malate, be it in waging war or in observing the peace, in writing or in taking to the streets -- living out our contradictory lifestyles and values, creating an open space for the time when we may all agree on what we stand for, and find it in ourselves to fight the real struggle for country vs. poverty, enemies and all.

Hopefully we see that this time can be now.

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The author is currently doing her thesis for an M.A. in Philippine Studies at the U.P. Departamento ng Filipino at Panitikan ng Pilipinas. She does freelance writing and editorial work on the side. Her passion is teaching.

political disempowerment: why people are not out on the streets

This is what i know:

WE ARE a DEMOCRACY! that means power should emanate from the people
My polsci teacher asked us in class, why are we afraid of another poeple power then if that is exactly the essence of a democracy.

the answer is this: we are politically disempowered

why?

1, the middle class is too comfortable, having a myopic stance and not seeing that there is NO progress, we are stagnating because of corruption

2. most Filipinos are poor - i believe poverty is the greatest hindrance to freedom kaya some are letting themselves be bribed para magrally

3. some of the masses are moving, but they are not heard by the elites and middle class kasi nga feel ng mga nakatataas nagdedestabilize sila, not seeing that RALLIES and people power are constitutional and must be seen to be necessary to exact acountability from our leaders

4. many intellectuals are not anymore thinking critically and do not take the responsibility to lead

5. there are lesser avenues given that the admin is suppressing the people's voices: extrajudicial killings, abduction (saying they have been asking for protection), etc.

6. LGUs and provinces are pro food, pro health, etc, not pro govt and because they are entrenched in the padrino system, they'd rather accept the status quo given that they are at least getting some benefit, not seeing that that is not real progress

What we should do is be politically empowerred for that is the true meaning of democracy
we should not ask for democracy, we should act as a democracy

Dapat makiaalam tayo, we should look at what is happening to our country and be critical about what we read on papers and watch in the news.

We should not remain idle, this is not a time to be in the middle ground, we have to take a side.

I only wish we are truly informed before we do decide which side to take.

Let us be informed, and Let us be responsible for our One Country!!!