Mediaboss Marketing

For decades, but especially since the Edsa People Power Revolt restored press freedom in the country, the Philippines has prided itself in having one of the freest, if not THE freest press, in the region.

Recovering from the repression and control of the media during the Marcos dictatorship, journalists basked not just in the sudden freedoms they enjoyed, but also in the number of employment opportunities that emerged, with the sudden blooming of media outletsnewspapers, magazines, radio stations and even TV networks, some of which reverted to the old owners displaced by martial law.

Not everyone, of course, welcomed the wild and wooly media environment that emerged with the Marcoses departure. As former president Fidel Ramos once declared, whenever he read the days papers, some make me want to commit suicide, while others make me want to commit homicide.

These days the media profession faces challenges that in those heady post-Edsa days werent even on the horizon. The advent of new information technology has threatened the viabilitynay, the very lifeof whats now called traditional media. Even as newspapers and broadcast outfits struggle to remain relevant and keep their advertising advantage over that of Facebook, blogs, e-magazines and such micro news sources like Twitter, they must also contend with the emergence of a world where everybody with a cell phone can become a journalist.

I would think that in such a world, media boundaries would be widening rather than narrowing, and that entities that must deal with all kinds of mediaespecially governmentswould learn how to better relate to all kinds of people dealing with and demanding information, confirmation, opinion and judgment.

In this post-WikiLeaks world, nothing remains secret for long, and governments cannot hope to dictate the manner and conduct of coverage in a media environment that is as loose, uncontrollable and almost boundless as it is today.

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All this is by way of preface to news that the Bureau of Immigration has decided to blacklist nine unnamed Hong Kong journalists for allegedly posing a security threat to P-Noy.

The blacklisting stems from a press conference that the President held during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit held in Bali, Indonesia, last year. During that event, the nine journalists, as some reports put it, crossed the line when they aggressively questioned P-Noy about the continuing controversy over the botched rescue of hostages (who were all Hong Kong residents) at the Luneta in 2010.

BI spokesperson Elaine Tan defended the decision, saying that showing disrespect or mak(ing) offensive utterances to symbols of Philippine authority is sufficient reason to ban an individual from entering a country.

Continued here:
Journalists behaving badly