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3 Philippines: Fanning the flames of
war By Herbert Docena
MANILA - As Mindanao reels yet again on
the brink of another all-out war, sections of the
mainstream print media may be helping push it
closer to the edge.
A quick round-up of
their coverage tells us what in their view has
been happening: a rogue commander not supported by
the rest of the Moro National Liberation Front
(MNLF) and who is coddling "al-Qaeda-linked" Abu
Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah members
started it all by attacking
the military. The military had no choice but to
retaliate. Now things are spiraling out of control
and it's all the terrorist-coddling rogue
commander's fault.
Such a plot may well
have been written by the public-information office
of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). But
it is precisely how the conflict is being passed
off as truth to the public by certain sections of
the press. The underlying message is hard to miss:
the military are necessarily the "good guys" and
they need our unconditional support.
Take
for example veteran defense reporter Manny
Mogato's dispatch for Reuters on April 17:
"Fighting between government forces and rogue
Muslim rebels is spreading in the southern
Philippines, shattering hopes for peace and
threatening local support for a US-backed campaign
to flush out militants." [1]
Note that the
word "rogue" - a value-laden adjective synonymous
to "rascal" or "scoundrel", according to a
thesaurus - was not enclosed in quotation marks.
Wire-service editors, usually allergic to the
faintest hints of editorializing, apparently let
it pass. The word "alleged", a convenient term for
attributing a claim to a source, is missing. There
is also no indication that the reporter was merely
using a word used by the military to describe
their adversaries. The writer himself apparently
believes - and leads his readers to believe - that
the other actors in the conflict are indeed
"rogues".
In another paragraph, Mogato
describes the leader of the "rogue" rebels, Ustadz
Habier Malik, as a "renegade" commander - again,
without using quotation marks. The term "renegade"
is likewise used without quotation marks by
Anthony Vargas of the Manila Times and ABS-CBN's
(Alto Broadcasting System-Chronicle Broadcasting
Network's) online news.
Reporting for the
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Michael Lim Ubac,
Christine Avendano, and Julie Alipala wrote:
"President [Gloria] Macapagal-Arroyo ... gave free
rein to the Armed Forces of the Philippines to
pursue Moro terrorists on Jolo island." [2] Note
that the word "terrorist", a highly emotionally
charged term, does not have quotation marks around
it and there is nothing to suggest that the
reporters were merely using Arroyo's word. It was
their own.
The headline, "GMA tells AFP:
Pursue MNLF rebel", proclaims whom they are
referring to. They also describe Malik as a
commander of a "rogue faction" of the MNLF but
without indicating that such a description was
bestowed by the government, not something that
they found out on their own. If such glaring
editorializing was an oversight, there was no
correction the following day.
Alipala, in
another Inquirer article published on April 25,
wrote: "Military clashes against Abu Sayyaf
terrorists and their coddlers have triggered fresh
evacuation of residents in nine towns on the
island." Having reported that the armed forces had
been running after the MNLF's "rogue faction"
because it was accused by the military of coddling
the Abu Sayyaf, Alipala and her editors seem to
have gone one step further.
They
explicitly accept the military's avowed rationale
for the war and inform their readers that yes,
indeed, without any doubt, the MNLF has been
coddling the Abu Sayyaf and that this is truly the
reason the military is hunting it.
In this
case, Alipala outdid even the armed forces
themselves, because as late as April 21, chief of
staff General Hermogenes Esperon himself was
quoted by the Inquirer as saying that they were
still "validating" reports about the MNLF linking
up with the Abu Sayyaf. [3] If Alipala had other
sources of information to support her contention,
she did not disclose them.
The above is,
with few exceptions, typical: reporters have taken
to appropriating the Philippine military's
explanation in their narrative and to adopting the
military's labels and adjectives as their own. [4]
Journalists normally attribute claims to their
sources and take pains to put quotation marks
around their sentences or phrases.
For
example, instead of saying "fighting between
government forces and rogue Muslim rebels", one
could have, at the very least, said "fighting
between government forces and Muslim rebels
described as 'rogue' by the military". Or "Moro
fighters described as 'terrorists' by the
government" instead of "Moro terrorists". (To be
fair, one must also ensure that the Moro fighters'
own description of the military should also be
included.)
But choices are rarely
innocent: that attribution has been deemed
unnecessary points to just how much the world
views of the Philippine military and the reporters
covering them have melded.
Another basic
journalistic practice, that of allowing the other
party to air its side, was, in all of the articles
above, casually
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