TWO weeks from today will be the day of reckoning when millions of Filipinos go to the polls to vote for candidates of their choice in the country’s first ever automated elections. The Commission on Elections says it is ready to prove what it has been saying all along—that this new-fangled process will be a success, contrary to what cynics and similar doomsayers have predicted.
Be that as it may, all right thinking Filipinos would rather believe that the process will turn out to be a landmark accomplishment and forerunner of credible elections in the future. Meanwhile, harried candidates will be embarking on a last minute push for victory, a wind-up that entails spending for more campaign materials, media exposure (print, radio, television), candidates jumping like grasshoppers from one political aggrupation to another, millions of pesos changing hands in vote-buying sprees—you name it.
And, lest we forget—of course, the usual spectacle of hired goons sending some hapless candidates or their supporters to kingdom come. In the business of getting rid of political rivals, bullets are faster than ballots.
But, what has characterized the current election fever, as in the past, is the relationship between politicians and media. “As unto the bow the cord is, so is man unto woman, useless each without the other.” That line from high school poetry refers to the bow (and arrow) and the cord which bends it. The cord bends the bow, but when the bow unbends, the cord follows. Yseless each without the other. Do politicians need members of the media? Yes, and vice versa. That is self explanatory. Politicians need the media to project the former’s image in any number of ways. The members of media need the politicians so the former can write stories about them and get paid for it by management (and sometimes by the politicians, as if you didn’t know).
It’s a symbiotic relationship, useless each without the other.
The responsibility of media to the voting public is even more paramount. The journalist who is true to his profession has a great responsibility to “tell it like it is”, as the saying goes. But it does not always happen that way. There’s no point belaboring the subject. Anyone with average intelligence can read between the lines and be able to discern what the journalist is trying to convey is so many words. Sometimes, too, there is no need to do that as the paid hack in media minces no words to show where his/her allegiance lies.
In such situations, the journalist falls short of his/her journalism Code of Ethics and in that way does a disservice to the voters who need to know what the real issues are so they could be guided accordingly in exercising their sacred duty to society and to themselves and their loved ones. Elections are serious affairs that should not be left to unscrupulous politicians and journalists to muddle with.
Too often what the voter reads in newspapers or see on television fail to give them the information they need to have to help them make informed choices on the vital issues at stake. As it is, they find themselves being subjected to a cacophony of empty political slogans devoid of substance. What the politicians say the reporters transmit to their readers or viewers, and the latter end up no wiser. Empty rhetoric never does anybody any good.
Will the 2010 elections be different?
