TODAY, November 23, 2017, is the 8th Davao Media Freedom Day. It is also the 8th anniversary of the Ampatuan Massacre.
Organized by a few media practitioners to come up with an annual commemoration right on the first anniversary of the massacre, the preparations for the day remains to be a harried and hurried exercise by the handful of media persons. Not because of any desire to keep it exclusive, but more because everyone's harassed with work, there is no time to gather a big group.
The intention is served as the commemoration marks every year that passes while the wheels of justice grind ever so slow. The original plan to focus this commemoration every year on communication arts students so that the memory of eight years ago will live on in the youth who at the time may not have even been aware of this gruesome event still holds eight years hence (and soon, nine, and 10, and 11...).
It may be a whole different media world now, less than a decade later. The buzzword may be digital first and fail fast as mainstream media traverses through the crosscurrents of a changing medium with no clear direction yet in sight on how these evolving newsrooms will look like in the next two to five years. Throw in the fake news and trolls and 'tards into the picture and the memory of a massacre ... the horizon may seem even murkier.
But it's really not that complicate for as long as we uphold the tenets of journalism.
In a world where everyone now has a medium to inform and communicate, whether what is being passed around is true or not, the journalist finds his relevance. Seemingly lost amid all this noise is the age-old discipline of real journalism: the discipline of verification.
As any journalist worth his salt should know by heart, the foundation of the Discipline of Verification as expounded by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in "The Elements of Journalism" rests on three core concepts – transparency, humility, and originality.
Returning to how it should have been, transparency simply means presenting your work so that readers can decide why they should believe you. Yes, it's up to the readers, not you. Having said that, comes humility. Do not assume, and do not be arrogant about your knowledge. It's all about keeping an open mind so that one's bias does not warp not only not only what they hear but also their own ability to understand what it means.
Finally, Originality. If you profess to be a true journalist, then do your own work. Passing on press releases and media spins is fooling your audience if not blocking the truth.
Then we return to the gruesome memory of eight years ago and remember that the reason there was a backhoe in that deserted field is because the perpetrators thought they can hide the truth by literally burying it. Big coverup, small coverup, still a coverup, what makes a PR-reliant journalist any better?
Here we see that the real task is not to call out and humiliate purveyors of fake news, the more noble task is to rise above the din and influence the audience to become more discerning about the information they are taking in.
We are being called to return to what journalism is really all about. By keeping that in mind, the future becomes clearer even if the gadgets are fast-changing.