Mangling journalism

Mangling journalism | Daily Tribune

“Ameobatic” (or shapeless, shifting, crawling) social media content creators of the Peanut Gallery Media Network (PGMN) variation preening as journalists got the goat of journalists of all stripes last week.

Journalists disdaining the ruse is understandable, particularly following the NBI arrest of one of PGMN’s founders, Franco Mabanta, over extortion allegations.

Meanwhile, in obviously trying to distance themselves from the scandal’s fallout, beleaguered PGMN supporters attempted framing the scandal as a journalism issue, to no avail.

In fact, UP journalism professor Danilo Arao asserted that “as a professor who teaches journalism ethics, I sometimes use PGMN content to teach students how not to practice the profession.”

If that is the case, what manner of amoeba then is PGMN? How is it different from true journalism?

Some media industry observers describe the social media-based PGMN as generally a public relations outfit and that it is acting suspiciously as a political operator because of its pronounced promotion of some politicians and propaganda-like take on politics.

Granting that’s a correct description, it means practicing journalists on their own can readily name who exactly are their peers in the discipline and easily talk about their balanced truth-seeking systems.

That perhaps is a small point, but it becomes relevant when considering that many are relatively clueless about how a journalist exactly goes about doing his or her job.

Added to that shortcoming is the fact that those who technically aren’t journalists are actively mimicking journalistic practices.

Social media creators mimicking journalism practices and then weaponizing these are concerning since such manipulative mimicry threatens to make the present-day journalist a total anachronism, monuments to a lost media world.

Such distaste, however, isn’t about regrets. After all, journalists and the media industry itself, like other threatened professions and industries, have to keep up and adjust with the times.

Instead, the disdain comes from the complaint that these pseudo news outfits and their shifty practitioners shamelessly mangle sacrosanct, constitutionally guaranteed press freedom, turning this freedom into a convenient shield for abusive practices.

Added to that is the deliberate annihilation of the singular sacrosanct social and political responsibility of the true journalist: speaking truth to power.

Besides actively seeking factual information daily, speaking truth to power has always been one the most difficult responsibilities of the true journalist.

Rightly so, since speaking truth to power requires that a journalist keep a certain distance from power and be indifferent to its entreaties, even if the journalist, by the quirks of the profession, is in daily proximity to that same power.

Succumbing to the temptations of wielders of power to participate in their power not as an observer is an all too real issue in journalism.

Yet, the genius of a true journalist lies in his or her keeping their distance. As the late American neoliberal columnist Walter Lippmann once aptly noted: “For it is a fact that a man can’t see the play and be in it, too.”

But in our present moment, “speaking truth to power” and its attendant demand for moral courage is visibly disintegrating before our very eyes.

This at a time the people most need it, when the people are plagued by conflicting claims, and the concept of objective truth is undermined by mercenary social media content creators even before the truth can be spoken; at a time when mercenary hucksters ceaselessly manufacture their own “truths” so their brainwashed followers reject factual reality in favor of emotional loyalty.