As the world celebrates the 30th Press Freedom Day today, it is worth looking at how the community press survives given the threat and the competition between the mainstream media organization and the media organizations sponsored by the state.
Moving around Mindanao which according to many is a region hostile for journalists, I can say that community press struggles to live in a free space and still describe it as a free press in a lockdown mode, as most of the community media organizations are owned and controlled by the powers that be and by the politicians, who, as always promote their interest via their social media pages.
The exercise of the real essence of press freedom has become a costly endeavor, especially to the community press because of proximity and the eager trolls await in every story or post from a critically-minded journalist as media organizations are mostly owned by politicians to promote their own interests.
Members of the community press are underpaid, yet the Philippine government and the media agency owners have yet to talk about how to thresh out the imbalance. Despite the underpayment issue, the real threat is always in the offing, from being bullied, intimidated, and bashed, worse sexual abuse still exist but some endured in silence these, are over and above the cyber libel threat.
The so-called freedom of the press has been limited to getting information from the government feeds thru their digital pages.
The age of digitalization has provided the attack dogs the unlimited and unfiltered space with so much freedom to threaten the media as institutions, free air space is only good for promotions but critical opinion run the risk of getting bashed and harassed by attack dogs.
How can real press freedom exit in a country of want? Media organizations have become the receiving end of the government’s own way of communicating with the people. Access to government officials and documents has been constrained as information is uttered just like a person wearing a face mask to cover the contagious information.
A safe media environment has yet to be created.
One, cannot just blame journalists because they too need to exist and kowtow to the powers’ interest as hungry pangs await back home and the security of tenure remains uncertain.
Freedom of the press is a community of want like a man wearing a face mask to prevent the spread of a bacterial truth which is harmful to community press existence.
The data from the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), showed that 197 journalists had been killed since 1986 and the majority of them from Mindanao, topping it all was the massacre of journalist in Maguindanao, which until now remains unsolved. The case of our very own, Orlando “Dondon” Dinoy, Benjie Caballero, Ed Dizon among others are just a few of the statistics of Mindanao journalists getting killed. Sadly, until now, the cases still hang and
