Forgetting, or not knowing: Media and martial law

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Written by Luis V. Teodoro

Monday, 20 September 1999 03:00

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Forgetting, or not knowing: Media and martial law
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I didn’t quite now how to do this paper. The martial law period is a personal matter to me. It is not only because I was imprisoned for seven months, from October 1972 to May 1973. It is also because of the many people I knew, some of them among the brightest and best sons and daughters of the Filipino people – students and poets, artists and doctors, teachers and lawyers, journalists and farmers, workers and small businessmen, nuns and priests, and plain citizens of their generation – who lost their lives, were separated from their loved ones, or suffered torture and other indignities during that brutal period.

Along the way, during the dark ages of the Marcos terror, I also saw, and heard about, crimes so unspeakable one is hard put to call the perpetrators human. Though with the foreknowledge of failure, I will try to maintain some kind of academic, meaning neutral, tone in this piece, despite my belief that martial law was too important a period to leave to academics to discuss. That period needs to be understood by the millions of people in this country to whom it is either an abstract construct and something far removed from their concerns – or, if at all they know something about it, regard it as an aberration, an abnormality in a system that is otherwise sane and reasonable.

My own view is that martial law and its architects were the logical children of the political, economic and social system. They included not only Ferdinand Marcos but also the “Rolex 12?–the generals and civilian officials Marcos took into his confidence in planning and implementing this vast conspiracy against the Filipino people – as well as the murderers and torturers he let loose upon this land so that he might continue to rule it.

Since the system that gave them birth has remained basically unchanged, it has not only bred, but is even now still breeding the same creatures from the black lagoon of corruption, national betrayal and injustice that is at its core. Yet not all of these creatures repose in its dark depths still, many have resurfaced and now actually walk among us in various guises.

Remembrance is indeed the only antidote to the return of authoritarian rule. But what once made it possible – and, from the standpoint of Marcos and company, necessary – is still with us and makes it reprise, though not necessarily in the same form, a constant peril.

It is from within that framework that I will now address the task at hand, which is, What happened to media during the martial law period, and what that has meant to media and this country.

When Ferdinand Marcos placed the entire country under martial law in Sept. 21, 1972, among the immediate targets of the military for arrest were journalists and other media practitioners who shared one characteristics. All had been critical of the Marcos government, to some extent or the other, although two gossip columnists (Amelita Reysio-Cruz and George Sison) who were similarly thrown into Camp Crame had also committed the unpardonable offense of making fun it.

Included in the Armed Forces of the Philippines “National List Of Target Personalities” were reporters, editors and columnists from the Manila Times (e.g., Rosalinda Galang), the Daily Mirorr (Amando Doronia), the Philippines Herald (Bobby Ordonez), the Manila Chronicle (Ernesto Granada), the Philippine News Service (Manuel Almario) the Evening News (e.g., Luis Beltran) and Taliba (Rolanda Fadul), at that time the only broadsheet in Filipino. Juan Mercado of the Press Foundation of Asia was also arrested.

Writers from Graphic magazine (Luis R. Mauricio), Asia-Philippines Leader (Ninotchka Rosca), and the Philippines Free Press (Napoleon Rama) were also imprisoned at the Camp Crame Detention Center. Broadcasters from radio and television (Jose Mari Velez and Roger Arrienda) completed the list. With the arrests, all media organizations were also shut down. In the morning of September 23 people awoke without a newspaper on their doorsteps and with only the hiss of empty air over their radios.

The arrest of journalists still occurs with alarming frequency today, though, so far, only in other countries. In those countries journalists have been so targeted for such “reasons” as insulting heads of state, an offense we call libel in the Philippines, as well as other , even more basic reasons most people would have no problem second-guessing.

Media practice after all involves the exercise of power: the power to arm other men and women with information on matters that bear on their lives, enabling them to form opinions about them, and to take action in the furtherance of those views.

Journalists, because they deal in information, can help populations make sense of what’s happening, and no matter how indirectly, can be instrumental in mass decision-making. Journalists are potential lead actors in the democratization process, social change, and even revolutions.

While it is not journalists who usually overthrow governments, they can arm the consciousness of those who do–the citizens who, having understood their society’s as well as their own state from various sources of information including, and, in many cases today, primarily the mass media, storm prisons and palaces.

To justify the arrest of media practitioners and the padlocking of media, Marcos characterized Philippine media as licentious and abusive, and worse, involved in what he labeled the “Leftist-Rightist conspiracy to overthrow the government.” (Presidential Proclamation 1081) This was merely another way of saying, however, that the information some media practitioners were disseminating was not favorable to the Marcos government.

But the licentiousness of the Philippine press before Sept. 21, 1972 was evident in many cases familiar to contemporary observers. It was evident in the sensationalized treatment of news, in the liberties that were often taken with the facts in order to angle stories to sell more copies, in the emphasis on sex and violence of which not only the tabloids were guilty.

But the licentiousness, much like today, tended to conceal the fact that there was at the same time honest, in-depth reporting, informed editorials and columns, and plain good writing. The source of these parallel development was an entire generation of journalists and writers who had come of age during the intellectual and political ferment of the mid-60s that occurred during the rapid growth of the radical student movement. In the 40s and 50s conservative to the point of reaction, the Philippine press in the 60s accepted into the profession – unknowingly, I am certain – young journalists whose outlooks were reformist, even revolutionary.

Veterans of the campus and national struggles of that period, these young practitioners helped politicize some of their older colleagues, among whom, in any case, there were remnants of 1950s radicalism. This reformist-revolutionary wing of the press produced the reports, the opinion pieces and the writing that echoed the demands on the streets and in the countryside for fundamental change, and the condemnation of “imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.”

Who or what did this phrase refer to? Ferdinand Marcos was first of all the arch-bureaucrat capitalist striving to enrich himself and his own through the office to which the Filipino people had regrettably elected him twice. He was–necessarily, some would say – also the protector of the feudal tenancy system (”the worst of the planet,” according to Roy Prosterman), while at the same time serving as chair of the local executive committee – the Philippine government – of what is now politely referred to as US hegemonism.

It was therefore not only on the streets, where democracy was being given substance by the tens of thousands people who expressed their demands for fundamental change through the demonstrations that from 1970 to 1972 were taking place daily all over the country, that Marcos was being attacked. Marcos and the entire system he headed were also under threat from the newspaper. They were also under siege in the arts and in the literature that had flowered in the bosom of the vast people’s movements of the '60s and early '70s.

But the threat was neither one of physical annihilation nor of being overthrown-at least not yet. The threat was that of being exposed. Slowly but surely unmasked, Marcos and his cohorts could no longer rule in the old way – that is, under democratic pretenses, with the trappings of liberal democracy including press freedom.

One of Ferdinand Marcos’ first acts as strongman was therefore to shut down newspapers and other media and to create a censorship system to ensure that the press–at least that part of it that he allowed to resume publication–would support rather than challenge his regime. This system was part of a package of intimidation which included Marcos-amended anti-subversion, rebellion and sedition laws and even a rumor-mongering decree.

Just how correct the regime was in regulating the press, instituting a system of censorship and seeing to it that only reporting and opinion-writing favorable to it appeared in the press may be gleaned from what happened both during the 14 years of the martial law period as well as afte.

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