what is being brought to light too, i find, is that while Lito Zulueta’s biases are questioned precisely because of the place he occupies in the Philippine Daily Inquirer vis a vis UST, his engagement with this issue has not happened in the broadsheet he works for. whereas Luis Teodoro’s attacks on him have happened in a regular Business World column.
the discussion, thankfully, continues. (more…)
two weeks since the discussion that had most everyone ganging up on UST and Lito Zulueta and siding with Marites Danguilan Vitug ang rappler.com, where is the discourse on media (online and otherwise) at this point? rappler has quietly revealed itself to be about helping out government instead of being a critical voice that at the very least asks: how much was paid BBDO for this campaign and is it worth it? i guess no questions like that for “uncompromised journalism” now tagging itself as “citizen journalism.”
and i guess it’s not surprising. if there’s anything the lynch mob that was the middle class / educated online world revealed then, it was that a love affair exists among those who are holding the fort of “new media” | “online media” — self-proclaimed and otherwise. if anything i am reminded that in media, as with the literary world, and maybe every aspect of this Pinoy culture, what keeps the status quo are friendships: ones that run deep, ones that are unquestioned from within. the question for Ressa and Teodoro really is whether or not they could have at any point disagreed with Vitug on this and any story? the question for all of us who blindly want to be invited into the bubble of middle class media and sort-of-NGO work is how many questions will we then fail to ask?
congratulations are in order: the DOT after all has triggered a meme of itsmorefuninthephilippines and its campaign has functioned exactly the way they imagined (with the help of a media enterprise now admitting its bias, yehey!) it is not without its critics, myself included, but i don’t mind letting it have a life all its own, commentary included about as much as unthinking celebration: if we can trip on the DPWHere, how can we not trip on this one?
which is not to agree that we should be blinded by all this fun. which is to hope that we all know — we all agree — that tourism in itself, as an industry is a sharp and double-edged sword. one only needs to look at Boracay and Tagaytay and find that foreign investment has meant congestion and pollution and the slow but sure killing off of local industry.
Poor entrepreneurs have generated their own capital over time, by starting small and reinvesting profits over several years. However, they may be squeezed out if outside investors drive rapid growth in the industry – as occurred at Boracay Island in the Philippines (Shah, 2000).
one only needs to walk through Makati Avenue on any evening, or Greenbelt 3 on a weekend to find that here are forms of tourism like we don’t want to talk about. go off to Angeles and find the industry of girlie bars that have been brought back to life by the middle-aged Caucasian man who has decided to disappear quietly in the Philippines upon retiring from wherever in the world he comes.
“The Department of Tourism is treading on dangerous waters. Marketing the Philippines as a destination for divorcees is practically synonymous to marketing the Philippines as a destination for sex tourists” (gabriela website, 2011)
The Philippines is one of the favored destinations of paedophile sex tourists from Europe and the United States. (“Global law to punish sex tourists sought by Britain and EU,” The Indian Express, 21 November 1997)
The tourism program of the government which aims to project the Philippines as a major tourist destination has increased the number of prostituted women. As more and more areas of the country are targeted for tourism, more and more women are driven to prostitution in desperation to ensure their family’s survival. (“Women Evaluate the State of the Nation,” GABRIELA, 24 July 1997)
these statements might be decades old, yes. that these resonate in the present? it is everything and telling of what any tourism program has to care about. it’s also to point to this fact: the reality has got to get better for the majority in this nation, so that they might know of those fun images, too. the goal has to be about making those witty taglines real for all of us.
because let us not even talk about tourism and this campaign, as if it is something that will save us from anything at all. know that this campaign in particular is replete with the limitations brought on by social class: more than who would even say “it’s more fun…” here, who exactly can afford to think about fun in this way? who has the wherewithal to be putting together memes, to have photographs of nation that are deemed worthy for being tagged “fun”?
know too that in the narratives of tourism across the world, it is the poor that suffers for it. they are the ones who lose access to their own resources, because they are not equipped to negotiate with the programs of tourism that exist.
there are many other examples where a few private entrepreneurs exclude local people in order to gain key assets, often through unauthorised land-grabbing. For example, Sabang is the gateway town for St Paul’s National Park in the Philippines, and 20–30 years ago contained much public land, almost all of which has now been privately exploited. The local authority lacks effective power to prevent breaches of planning regulations (Ashley, Boyd, Goodwin 2000).
know that “Tourism development has not <…> incorporated poverty elimination objectives. It remains driven by economic, environmental and/or cultural perspectives at national and international levels” (Ashely etal., 2000).
and in the philippines it is driven now by the notion of fun: which is always and only fleeting. which is only true for a few of us.
because 2011 ended with some sadness, and the new year had me on a roll, which is to say it forced me to hit the ground running. one must be thankful.
the yearender for arts and theater and the one on popular culture were up before the end of 2011. though with the Metro Manila Filmfest happening at the end of the year, too, these could only be overshadowed by the notion of ending-with-a-bang and a foreboding of the year to come. the sadder thing might be that this has fueled discussions on Pinoy film from people who admit they haven’t watched it in a while. well what else is new with regards elitism in this country.
which is to segue too into the fact that i did see some of the MMFF films: the Asiong Salonga review and the My Househusband review are up, and i have two more to go. suffice it to say that as far as Asiong is concerned, what we might demand for at this point is a viewing of the director’s cut, if only so we can judge its creative team who were ignored / disrespected / dissed by the movie’s producers as they added removed scenes, changed music and/or sound, and messed with the editing of the film. that’s the work of director Tikoy Aguiluz, editor Miranda Medina, and musical score by Nonong Buencamino that we have yet to judge Asiong Salonga by. show us the director’s cut na!
in the meantime, the wish for 2012, has to be clarity and truthfulness and just our cards on the table. because it seems that between those faked-up magazine covers and press releases about objective journalism, between power-to-the-people rhetoric and the govt strategy of running a government campaign by not doing it themselves, 2012’s begun on very very rough ground.
<…> “good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great,” Slavoj Zizek says, and yes he was talking about the violence of communism and stalinism, but in third world philippines, he could just be talking to you and me and our lack of a sense of the realities that define us. it could just be you and me refusing to get to the heart of any and all of this nation’s problems: a failure in the system that allows for the poor to get poorer and grow larger, and a minority to get richer. and i daresay, the middle class thinking they can save the world by working — admittedly or not — within the system the State has set up.
“The basic insight I see <with regards the Occupy Movement> is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception is that there is a flaw in the system as such. It’s not just the question of making the system better.” — yes Zizek, not anymore.
we should all be reminded of this the rest of 2012.
quotes from Zizek via this Harper’s Magazine interview by J. Nicole Jones, November 2011.
truth to tell i didn’t care much about this “expose” of Marites Danguilan Vitug because it was a non-Corona non-issue to me. non-Corona, because exposing the lack of a dissertation, the number of years he took to finish the phd, his ineligibility for the honors he was given, point to the fact that this was always a UST issue. the basic question being: why make corona an exemption to university rules?
and i didn’t care for that question because i knew without a doubt that Corona’s phd could easily fall under the purvey of academic freedom and autonomy (as the UST statement has said) — within which of course patronage politics and favoritism and everything horrid you can imagine actually exist. that this was UST’s prerogative is truth. this doesn’t make this an easier truth to swallow.
but maybe we should swallow our egos and admit that as with every other institution in this country, the academe is not one that we must comfortably equate with “academic rigor” or “quality and calibre.” if you are realistic about the academe here, and truthful even to yourself if you’re a member of it, then you’d know that patronage and politics are the invisible hands that put and keep people in power there, and in fact this can get you everything from the good raket outside of the academe to the positions of power within it, or just an easier time at an MA and/or a PhD. what we should be looking at in fact, is output: how many of our degree holders are actually relevant to nation? how many of those dissertations will hold up to scrutiny?
and what did the UST faculty and panel think of corona’s scholarly treatise in place of the dissertation? baka naman brilliant at hindi lang natin alam. for all we know he deserved that phd, because too, UST touches on something crucial to the discourse of the university in this country. UST says that they
i haven’t heard of this kind of freedom from and within the two universities i’ve been part of as student and teacher. ang galing that UST can award Naty Crame Rogers a doctorate degree because certainly she and many other literary and cultural stalwarts deserve it. not that they need a phd to be productive, but truth to tell Corona didn’t need this either: a phd is not even a requirement for becoming supreme court justice. go figure.
but Vitug insists questions are still unanswered:
well, yes. wouldn’t any independent private institution defend itself based on those grounds?
well, yes. and i say, if you demand that UST be clear about the rules it bends, then i demand it of all universities in the country. accountability for all (count the number of faculty members who will be given tenure if we were to be transparent about these rules!). which is still to say this: even the bending of rules based on whether a person deserves something, is totally within the university’s prerogative. again, non-corona, non-issue.
if i were the one who had blogged about this, i would’ve already backtracked and told my readers i had barked up the wrong corona tree, and missed the university prerogative point. but that’s me. and i’m no journalist.
which is really what this has become about, yes? beyond corona, it has become about that UST statement which raises questions about credibility and online journalism, ones that on Twitter and Facebook it seems people would rather dismiss as the questions of the ignorant. ah, but Shakespeare always said ignorance is bliss.
and it is with bliss that UST in fact dismisses Vitug as journalist, because they ask:
i’m sorry, but this was funny to me both on the level of UST’s dismissal but also on the level of its utter refusal to acknowledge Vitug as a credible figure, period. because for UST where she writes is of utmost importance as they go on to ask:
these are valid questions to ask, aren’t they? and certainly those behind Rappler cannot claim credibility — or demand we give them that — on the basis of who’s behind it and their years of experience. because if there’s anything we know about writing online, it’s that no matter your history of writing (Angela’s got a CV that will put into question countless credibilities online and beyond, excuse me), you’re only as good as that last piece, your mistakes are for the world to see, your ability at humility and apology crucial.
in this sense it is important that Rappler respond to these questions properly and accordingly, and not brush it off by invoking Vitug’s years as journalist or by saying that they are ” journalists <who> have worked for global news organizations and top Filipino news groups.” certainly if they take pride in being “online journalists” who “promise uncompromised journalism that inspires smart conversations and ignites a thirst for change” they must begin by answering questions on legitimacy and credibility, banking as they do on the names that are on their roster.
of course this will mean drawing lines between online journalism and non-journalism, news reporting and opinion, blogging and tumblelogging and tweeting, but this is a discussion worth having, now better than later, if only because that UST statement is a challenge to make those definitions clear.
if only because given such unquestioning love for the Vitugs and Ressas of this world, we now see revealed the bubble of friendship and camaraderie and mutual-admiration that uncritically exists online.
maybe we all only hate UST for daring to pop that bubble and reveal us for what we are: no better than the mainstream.