JOURNALISM AS A
COMMITMENT
Roan Libarios
1981-1982
Journalism is one of the most exacting of
all human endeavors. No other undertaking demands an unwavering social responsibility and
a fiercer commitment to truth than the field of journalism. For in the hands of a
journalist rests a weapon long tested in history as more formidable than a hundred armies
- a weapon that can make or unmake heroes, build or destroy tyranny, hasten or retard
movements for social liberation.
Truth, thus, may not only be the most
important principle in journalism; it must be the only guiding principle. But truth does
not exist in a void nor in the Platonic dogma of Truth. Its fibers is society; its
lifeblood is history. It submits to no hard and fast rules, much less to immutable
doctrines. It is always a product ofunceasing investigation, of painstaking inquiry into
the laboratory of society.
As such, every writer who professes to be
committed to his craft must be a diligent student of society and history. His dedication
to his craft demands from him no less than a willingness to accept the awesome
responsibility of arming himself with the correct world outlook and refining his skills of
social analysis. For in the final analysis, all ideas that drip from the writer’s pen
reflect his frame of mind, his world outlook and his understanding of society. Hence, to
argue that our journalism can be purely objective or can be completely freed from the
writer’s own value judgment is to reduce the mind into an empty bottle of sterile
receptacle of facts and ideas.
However, in our society where truth is
hounded from public sensitivity like a contaminating virus, journalism has become not only
an exacting endeavor but a perilous crusade. It is a crusade that screens out the
‘journalists’ from the journalists, from those who practice journalism with deep
social commitment and those purely for social gratification.
Confronted with gripping social
contradictions a journalist cannot stand neutral without committing violence to the
fundamental tenet of journalism - commitment to truth. For in the Philippine social arena,
truth has become more partisan than what his pen can even describe.
While millions are sunk in the deepening
mud of hunger, ignorance, and apathy, a few dozen families are wallowing in an expanding
bonanza of wealth, luxury, and power.
While the monstrous giants of foreign
capital and their local cohorts enjoy unlimited freedom to ravage the country’s rich
economic resources, Filipino workers and peasants only have the freedom to be exploited -
to be deprived of their right to reap the fruits of their toil as their own.
While the state calls its violence law,
that of a dissenting people a grave crime.
While official banquets and ribbon-cutting
ceremonies are sung to the utmost corners of the archipelago, stories of official abuses
and massacres are garbled instantaneously - and left to die with the last drop of the
victim’s blood.
Indeed, in a society racked by the
heightening contradictions between the interests of the ruling minority and the ruled
majority, any journalistic endeavor naturally assumes a partisan character. Amidst the
deafening outcry for social change, journalism cannot find a neutral sanctuary. Either it
contributes to the prolonging of the midnight or to the ushering of the dawn. |
