The Philippines: Freedom and the Media

More than 400 people were in attendance last week at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University in Manhattan to hear an address by Philippine President Corazon Aquino under the auspices of Distinguished Speakers Program and to ask her questions afterward. Excerpts from Aquino's remarks on the role the press played in the Philippine revolution:

Thank you, the media, for the invaluable role you played and continue to play in the transformation of my country. That role was invaluable, for it was truth that set us free.

The images and events during the elections and the revolution are deeply etched in the memory of our people and give inspiration to the other nations of the world: men and women linked arm to arm guarding the ballot boxes; computer technicians hired by the government to do the official count walking out of the fraudulent tabulation; tens of thousands of men and women, with their children about them, in vigil, half in fear, half in joy, guarding with their bodies the small detachment of rebel soldiers; nuns kneeling in the path of oncoming tanks; a nation rising to a new dignity. These images, and more, chronicled for all the world the courage and pride of a people, their deep faith in the rightness of their cause, the protection of God and the ultimate triumph of democracy.

And so you, the foreign media, have been the companion of my people in its long and painful journey to freedom.

But even as I briefly recount these momentous events, one should recognize an underlying reality that they reveal. The reality that you, more than others, should recognize: the liberating virtue of truth and the power of the media to make it happen.

It is a power, it seems, that feeds man's hunger for truth. A hunger that accepts no substitutes, neither promises of material progress nor safe and comforting lies, and will overcome the most intricate and comprehensive web of censorship. Although the Marcos regime effectively controlled the Philippine media, there was never a period when some kind of "alternative press" did not attempt to report the facts and challenge the misinformation published by the government. In the later stages of the regime, such alternative press took the form of small newspapers that operated from day to day under the constant threat of closure or arrest or paramilitary terrorism. But throughout the whole Marcos regime, there was always what may be described as the "Xerox media" and the "Betamax media." News items and opinion columns in U.S. newspapers and magazines were widely photocopied, and U.S. national newscasts were lifted in videocassettes, smuggled into the Philippines and reproduced over and over again by innumerable and spontaneous networks of Filipinos hungering for the truth.

The rebirth of Philippine democracy is undoubtedly the showcase of media power, but, less obviously, it is also a demonstration of its limits.