The outer side

Do we mark the 17th Cebu Press Freedom Week on the outer side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis?” The what? Over 19 centuries of history of the press are compressed by University of Southern Denmark academics into this bracket.

The world’s first-ever “newspaper” is found on the outer side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis,” namely, the 35-meter “Trajan’s Column” in Rome. Completed in 113 C.E., it reports Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian wars—in bas relief, “an incredibly expensive way to publish a story.” For centuries, thereafter, news was passed on orally or handwritten by scribes.

Until 1436 A.D., that is. Using borrowed money, Johannes Gutenberg invented, in Germany, the first press that used moveable wooden letters. Books and newspapers proliferated over the next six centuries. This “Print Revolution” is at the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” center.

The 39 years since Ferdinand Marcos padlocked newspaper offices and broadcast stations is on the outer side of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis.” Marcos clamped on Proclamation 1081 to “save democracy.” Fourteen years of stark dictatorship followed.

That would not be possible today because of the Digital Revolution that erupted.

The first inter-person communication on the Internet came in 1971, and in 2001, Filipinos were the first to wage a People Power revolution using the new cell phones. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolt featured new technology. So did looters in London’s 2011 riots. They deployed BlackBerrys to dodge movements by police.

No government today can confiscate all 78 million cell phones that Filipinos heft. (Compare that to 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.

“Thirty years 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, 7/24 news is the rule.

The uncertain “Arab Spring has been stoked by Twitter, Facebook, iPods, etc. All can have their say on the cyberspace expressway, often with a modicum of cross-checking.” This is the “Global Village” that Marshall McLuhan foretold—with a vengeance. This affects how our children see the world.

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”—the central function of journalism, especially in the post-Gutenberg era.

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

Such changes do not occur in a vacuum. This is a country where the needy, who number over 27 million, are often bought for a pair of sandals.

Surveys also tell us that today’s youngsters have hazy notions of the Marcos dictatorship. The insight of these future leaders into what People Power wrested back is tenuous. So is their sense of stewardship for nurturing restored freedoms.

We must resist the surge of an impatient journalism of assertion.

“Everyone is entitled to his opinion,” the late senator Pat Moynihan once said. “But not everyone can have a different set of facts.”

More than ever, mainline and online journalists must insist on the discipline of verification.

The journalist’s first obligation, then and now, is to the truth. That is the whole point about Press Freedom Week 2011.

These rites are about “the fine line we tread to honor a difficult past… the moral costs of both forgetting and remembering… searing moments that did injustice to lives that were lost or forever changed by brutal rulers,” columnist Ellen Goodman wrote.

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