A season of death

AS IT WAS then, it still seems to today.

In a couple of weeks, four members of media in Mindanao were shot at with three falling and one barely surviving. Members of the fourth estate have been falling like flies—again. And suddenly, killing journalists has become the fad anew as evidenced by three murdered media personalities in just a span of two weeks. For now, what was once simply a thankless job had suddenly been transformed into a very perilous one.

As much as it seemed to have become an open season for hunting down journalists, the irony of it has not been lost. Those who used to cover events had now become the fodder for incidents and have become the subject of news. The people behind the news are now on the news, and the news themselves. As tasteless as it sounds, it is true just the same. And it is precisely the truth of it that makes members of the mass media both tremble and cower in either fear or indignation, or both.

Tasked primarily to inform the people, the price tag had just gotten costlier as it now involves the very lives of the press people who are only doing their job. As simple as it is, those people concerned—read: the people behind the journalists’ murders—could hardly understand, or care less, that the journalists is only a vehicle for any information that has a direct effect on the public. We have never made up the information, it has been gathered, verified, confirmed and re-checked not only for veracity, but more so for objectivity, and whatever that comes out of it as the finished news, journalists only re-tells the tale.

The journalists have never been corrupt and as such have not used government funds for personal gains, nor utilized government equipment for personal use. We have never accepted certain percentages in exchange for giving projects to contractors and their ilk. Neither did we have a hand in putting forth vested interests in government policy planning in making sure that both our business and personal interests are well protected.

It is these kinds of news that usually irks those who are guilty. And irks more those who are guiltier. And as irritation grows, it reaches a point when sanity, logic and civility are thrown out of the window as desperation kicks in. Desperation in preserving all that has been gained in a not so pleasant and legal manner. Desperation in trying to protect a name that has long been rotten to the core yet no one has dared to speak it in the open. And desperation in trying to silence those who are about to say something just so they could carry on with their nefarious activities.

Why they vent their ire on the messenger may be understandable but why authorities had been quite helpless in checking this is incomprehensible. Most, if not all, of murder cases involving journalists had never been resolved satisfactorily, if they are resolved at all. Most have ended up in nothing—no arrests, no charges, no litigation and no punishment for whoever was responsible. There were times when every evidence points at only one direction yet law enforcers have been known to fumble the cases even before they get to courts. And it is exactly because of these that journalists’ murders are repeated again and again, and yet again.

The number of missing journalists, which were thought to at least go down, and at most to be eradicated altogether, remained at the same rate with that of the dictatorship era. The number of liquidated journalists also remained the same as is the oppression that was thought to have ended after Marcos got his ass reamed out of Malacañang. The freest press in the world tag was at best a rumor, and at worst a joke as the media remained under the gun and those who actually did their jobs, which is to inform the people of the real events that affects, affected and will affect them, were speedily branded as either left-leaning, communist sympathizer, or a commie bastard by the well-entrenched military, after which, they are either jailed, maimed or would just disappear with all traces erased.

The primordial duty of a journalist is to inform the people, for in doing so, they empower the people. An informed people are an empowered people, and as such is not a good recipe for corrupt and amoral officials. And if in doing this duty we end up owning up to a secondary duty—to lay our lives on the line—then there would be not much choices left. The least the authorities could do is to make sure that they resolve murder cases involving media personalities slain in line with their work just so they could create a precedent about journalists’ murders being resolved that may eventually put a stop to this macabre cycle.