Page 73 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

62 Benjamin Cole
change, the role of Radio Veritas was to reflect, mediate and facilitate change.
Ultimately it was people power and a military revolt which ousted Marcos, not the
media (McCargo 2003: 20–21). The internet and text messaging, in conjunction
with other mainstream media, are considered to have played a similar facilitating
role in the mass protest movement which forced President Estrada from office in
2001 (Pabico 2000). This illustrates the potential role and impact that the media
could have on the conflicts in the Philippines.
The quantity of reporting on conflict-related stories is huge and has increased
considerably since 2000, but the quality of the reporting is seriously flawed. In 2000
the media was acting as an agent of stability in respect of these conflicts. Its report-
ing of the Moro rebellion was largely one sided in favour of the government, with
many news reports simply reiterating official statements (Asia Times Online
2000b). The press did develop some contacts with the ASG, but most reporters were
dependent on military and government sources (Quintos de Jesus 2003). There has
however been some improvement since then. Studies by the Center for Media
Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), analysing reports in the five highest circula-
tion newspapers, showed that in 2000 roughly three quarters of news articles were
government sourced. By 2003 this had fallen to 60 per cent, with more than twice
the number of sources being used than was the case in 2000. This included a better
distribution of sources, with civil society at over 13 per cent, and almost 35 per cent
of articles using more than one source (Pe Benito and Cagoco 2004).
This decline in the reliance on official sources was reflected in the treatment of
the different conflicts. The CMFR studies showed that in 2000 the government
generally received fairly positive treatment while the ASG and the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front (MILF) generally received negative treatment. Barring neutral
articles, the 2003 study still showed continued negative treatment for the ASG at
73 per cent and the MILF at 80 per cent, but government policies also received a
negative treatment percentage of roughly 68 per cent (Pe Benito and Cagoco
2004). This indicates that sections of the media are gradually adopting a role as
an agent of restraint, through monitoring and challenging government policies.
Perhaps worried by its declining influence, the army announced in 2004 that it
wanted to ‘embed’ journalists covering the conflicts on Mindanao within its units
(Reporters Without Borders 2004).
In 2000, the media was also accused of being superficial and failing in its duty
to explain the war. Glenda Gloria, a journalist who has written extensively on the
Moro struggle, argued that the media was reporting the conflict as ‘nothing but a
cock fight – who’s losing, who’s winning’. The media was not questioning the
conflict at the policy level, with nobody asking important questions such as how
government policy was being crafted. Instead, Gloria suggested, the public was
being given a false notion that the war would end as soon as military victory was
achieved (Asia Times Online 2000b). This was confirmed by the CMFR, whose
studies found that in 2000 just over 1 per cent of stories contained background
information, in terms of insights into the history of the violence, details about
peace pacts, or meaningful statistics that clarified the bigger picture. By 2003 that
figure was close to 5 per cent. This represents a improvement, but almost half of