Protests Too Much

1024px-Orestes_Delphi_BM_GR1917.12-10.1

Here is something you don’t see every day: a major news website’s public apology for getting a story wrong.

Surprisingly, the apology was not for offending society with a jokey caption but for attributing a statement to a militant women’s group which immediately denied the statement and raised heck (sub-hell levels) on the Internet.

It was a basic violation of an unwritten rule of journalism–never assuming something unless stated directly–and we hope that the people who worked on the story were taken out back and promptly shot, or at least told to review their Philo 11. In any case, we hope they took their lumps.

Here is something that you actually do see every day, and anytime two or more are gathered in the name of calling other people names: a cute little media critique in the Manila Times by Katrina Stuart Santiago, scoring news websites Rappler and GMA News Online for destroying the fine tradition of Philippine journalism, a tradition that she is part of by virtue of writing opinion columns, which is not quite the same thing and is, if you look at the quality of opinion columnists we have now, hardly a virtue. read more »

Commentaries on the Network War

 

That the giant networks ABS-CBN and GMA have been trying to milk the Vhong Navarro incident for as much ratings and page views as they can is no real surprise.

Media critic blog Spinbusters pointed out as much in its recent post, and, coincidentally, nothing else. That they commented on the issue so late in the game and without contributing anything that everyone from the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility to basically anybody with an Internet connection and a social media account has already pointed out is telling, but that is a story for another day.

What should be of issue here is not the fact that media companies pushed the issue into national prominence in a bid to boost traffic.

That is the nature of the media beast and is news to nobody. The media companies will offer what the market wants, and protest as we may, a variety show host being beaten up and accused of rape is interesting, if mind-numbing and spirit-crushing, stuff.

What we should be looking at is the national prominence of the other players in this game. read more »