Pivotal concern

Is  media today wedged into the outer side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”? “The what?” blurted Cebu’s Press Freedom Week pooled editorial on Monday.

Every third week of September, media in Cebu tamps down fierce competition. Instead, they mark together how martial law shackled liberty of expression in 1972. In Cagayan de Oro and Dumaguete cities, the press holds  similar though shorter remembrance rites in May.

“Remembering with undiminished intensity, over time, need not make us curators of our ancestors’ grievances,” columnist  Ellen Goodman insisted. “We can honor the past, without being trapped in it.”

Most  of  today’s youngsters have hazy notions of the Marcos dictatorship, surveys confirm. These kids will wield power  tomorrow. Yet their insight into what People Power wrested back is tenuous. So is the sense of stewardship.

Cebu’s 2011 program, thus, includes conferences for mass communication students, films to  roundtables on professional issues. JV Rufino of Inquirer Mobile led a session on “Where is journalism in a digital world?”

Memory is both treasury and guardian. “It is right that media recall how Proclamation 1081 suspended human rights, padlocked Congress, censored the press and  co-opted many,” Cebu’s new archbishop, Jose Palma, told journalists after their traditional Press Freedom Walk.

“Some of you were in kindergarten  in Feb. 13,1986,” Palma  recalled. “Catholic Bishops’ Conference (then) issued a pastoral declaring the snap elections fraudulent. Speaking  the truth helped spark People Power I …  Filipinos were the first to wage nonviolent revolution, with cell phones for People Power 2 in 2001.”

“There are two freedoms,” Palma added. The false, where a man is free to do what he likes. And the true where  man is at liberty  to do what he ought. Today’s  cyberspace revolution made that  task more complex. In Filipino homes today, average time weekly spent trawling the Internet has doubled.

Is this the other side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”? Over  two millenia  of press history are compressed by scientists, into this bracket.

On this  earlier side of “Parenthesis”  is the world’s first-ever  “newspaper”: the 35-meter Trajan’s  Column in Rome.  Completed in 113 C.E., the tower depicts in bas relief, Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian wars. This was “an incredibly expensive way to publish a story.” For centuries  thereafter, news was passed on orally. Scribes handwrote  letters and books until the year 1436.

Using an 800-guilder loan, Johannes Gutenberg in Germany invented a machine that used moveable wooden letters. Books and newspapers proliferated over the next six centuries. This launched the  “Print   Revolution.” It forms the core of the “Gutenberg  Parenthesis.”

Ferdinand Marcos padlocked newspaper offices and broadcast stations in 1972. “Slavery was the price tag for democratic survival, Marcos told us that fateful night,”  the first Press Week editorial recalled. “Salvage victims and  corruption… were the penalty exacted by propagandists who masqueraded as journalists… Never again. (Indeed) revisiting  enforced ‘unanimity of the graveyard’ is essential….”

Yet even as Marcos gagged  the  mainline press, the “Digital  Revolution” uncoiled. The first inter-person communication on the Internet occurred  in 1971. Fax and cell phones followed.   Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolt  harnessed  new technology. In London’s 2011 riots, looters deployed  BlackBerrys to dodge   police.

No regime today can confiscate 78 million cell phones that  Filipinos heft. There are 168.2 million Indonesian cell phone owners. About 29.7 million Filipinos are wired into the Net. Chinese censors “firewall”   their 477.8 million Internet clients.

“(Decades) ago, there was no Internet, no cable TV, no online newspapers, no blogs,” recalls Richard Posner in his book “Bad News.” “The public’s consumption of the news used to be like sucking on a straw. Now it’s being sprayed like a firehose.” Today, 24/7 news is the rule.

Twitter, Facebook, iPods, etc., stoke the uncertain “Arab Spring.”  All can  have their  say on the cyberspace expressway. Many do so, often with little  cross-checking or ethical concern. “Everyone is entitled to his opinion,” the late senator Pat Moynihan groused. “But not everyone can have his own set of  facts.”

The new technology radically recasts journalism’s  tools. Electronics whittled away, to cite one example, the  traditional face-to-face oversight that editors exercised over reporters. There are few gatekeepers left.

This is the “Global Village”  that  Marshall McLuhan foresaw. It unfolds in a country  where the needy—over 27 million at last count—repeddled for a pair of sandals. “The greatest threat  are journalists who act as megaphones for the powerful.”

The  new media today can move truth—or falsehood—with the click of a mouse. “News organizations are abandoning the race to be the first to break the news,” the Economist notes. “[They’re] focusing instead on being the best at verifying.”

Beyond the “Gutenberg Parenthesis,” confirming truth  emerges as the pivotal  concern”  in tomorrow’s  journalism. Then and now, the journalist’s first obligation is to the truth. That  is the bottom line for Press Freedom Week 2011.

“Babel is the ancient image of conflicting views with scant regard for truth,” Palma said.

“But the Truth shall make you free. Truth spelt with a capital ‘T.’”