Principles and Premises on the Press

PRINCIPLES AND PREMISES ON THE PRESS (1991)

RESPONDING TO A PERCEIVE NEED for explicit unities on the most basic of points concerning the mass media in the Philippines, the following are basic points proposed as an integrated premise for views, discussions and resolutions on the media’s fundamental role in democratic society, and its corollaries in terms of media accountability, ethics, freedom, economics, external and internal interrelationships, professionalism and skills development.

1) Sovereignty resides in the people, and all public authority emanates from them; public service is a public trust, and public accountability should be upheld at all times.

2) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (1966), as well as the Constitution of the Philippines, guarantee to every citizen the right to be informed accurately and adequately about all matters of public consequence and the right to freedom of speech, of expression and of the press; these rights should be enjoyed by all citizens, regardless of social standing, gender, ethnic stock, religious and philosophical beliefs, culture, political affiliation and geographical location within the Philippine archipelago, and inequities on this should be opposed, diminished and eliminated. These rights of individual citizens should be enjoyed collectively by the citizenry, they being the sovereign body politic.

3) Processes entailed in social, political, economic, spiritual and cultural development of the Philippines require the full approval by, and active mobilization of, the citizenry to whose collective benefit such processes should primarily redound.

4) Adequate communication should flow between the people and their government, among groups of people and among individual citizens, in order to forge and certify the people’s sovereign and democratic will on general and specific policy matters, and in order to make possible their mobilization and synergism.

5) The mass media should primarily be a public service institution existing to serve fully these basic rights of the citizenry. The mass media can and does also exist as an industry, with both the owners and their personnel seeking to derive income from their operations, but quality and magnitude of public service should be the paramount standard of performance of media establishments and mediapersons to deserve any form of support from the public. Entertainment is a legitimate component of media content but this should not be allowed to overshadow, much less to contradict, the media’s public affairs functions.

6) In democratic society, facilities of mass communications are generally accessible for use by individual citizens, groups of citizens and the public, in order to guarantee and realize the full enjoyment of the people’s right to know and their right to be heard. Owners and personnel of these mass communication facilities should always be imbued with the spirit of giving paramount priority to public service, pushing them to upgrade capabilities and to exert maximum efforts to seek out the information the people have the right to know and the views the people have the right to express and disseminate these to the broad citizenry.

7) Basic editorial standards for public relevance valuation, plausibility and source reliability should be the only criteria guiding decision-making in the pursuit and treatment of news and information, including opinions, thus differentiating legitimate editorial judgments from censorship and self-censorship.

8) Whenever any media establishment is externally coerced and prevented from serving fully the people’s right to be informed and their right to be heard and heeded, there is press freedom repression; whenever any media establishment upon its own volition shortchanges the public for any reason on these basic rights or refuses to assert these rights, there is unethical media practice. This applies also to the freedom and ethics of individual journalists. The decisive element is the quality of output, although the matter of increasing or maintaining remuneration, like payola envelopes and advertising contracts, from vested interests, including news sources, is acknowledged as a major contributory factor for unethical media practices. Also responsible for unethical practices are media owners who do not adequately uphold the right of their personnel to job security, fair compensation, humane working conditions, self-organization and collective action, and opportunities for skills upgrading and career advancement.

9) Problems involving press freedom and media ethics can be effectively addressed by mediapersons only through a concerted, multilateral effort that encourages the broadest base of varying forms and levels of participation, coupled with developing and enlisting the active participation of the broad citizenry.

10) Maximum efforts should be exerted by the media community and the citizenry to optimize the role of the mass media in making the force of logic prevail over the logic of force. Justifications for the latter, like impediments to freedom of information and expression, and obstacles to justice, and violations of public trust and accountablity, should be denounced, opposed and eliminated by mediapersons shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the citizenry. In this context, the non-combatant status of journalists, like all other civilians, should be safeguarded and recognized by all, and its guarantee should be recognized and asserted as part of the functions of basic govrnance.

UPON A STRONG UNITY on these points, agreements on more specific points may be forged, and various specific projects and activities may be encouraged, launched, coordinated, publicized, evaluated and carried forward.

Originally titled “Proposed Integrated View on Media Freedom, Ethics and Unity,” this was first presented as a draft by Ed Aurelio Reyes, secretary general of the Philippine Movement for Press Freedom (PMPF), to fellow participants in the “Conference on the Role of the Media in Democratization and People’s Participation” at the Development Academy of the Philippines, Tagaytay City, on May 31 - June 1, 1991. Copies of this document were sent to various opinion leaders in the media community and presented to the House Committee on Public Information, before its publication in the PMPF’s Press Freedom Advocate. This has also been ratified by the Fifth National Convention for Press Freedom of August 31, 1991 after being adopted and endorsed earlier that month by the Second National Congress of the National Union of Journalist of the Philippines (NUJP) and the Founding Meeting of the Press Freedom Alliance of Southrn Tagalog (PRESSFAST).

Source: The book “Press Freedom: The People’s Right” by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, pp. 166-168.

Retyped for information campaign by: Gregorio V. Bituin Jr.