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By Bayani San Diego Jr./ Inquirer News Service
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Date Posted: 11:44:57 05/30/05 Mon
Author Host/IP: 222.126.7.90
Cheche and Karen: Self-regulation, not censorship
Posted 09:15pm (Mla time) May 30, 2005
By Bayani San Diego Jr./ Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A2-4 of the May 31, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
"COMPETITION on television is fierce," said award-winning broadcast journalist Cheche Lazaro. "But beyond competition, there is a higher interest-the public that media serves."
Lazaro, founding president of Probe Productions, Inc. and host of "The Probe Team Documentaries" on ABC 5, was commenting on the spate of sex-video scandals being aired on television.
Aside from being a respected broadcaster, Lazaro has been a commissioner for Communications in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) National Commission of the Philippines since October 2001.
Serious
Unesco is the latest of the various organizations to express serious concern over scandal TV.
Along with fellow commissioners Vicente Tirol of the Ateneo, Robert "Bob" Garon of the Manila Times and the Nazareth Formation House, and Karen Davila of "TV Patrol," Lazaro attended the recent consultative forum presided by Unesco national commission chair Dr. Florangel Braid and held at the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication.
Lazaro said other concerned sectors were invited to the forum, including the Professional Artist Managers, Inc. (Pami) which initiated the campaign against "unethical entertainment journalism" on television.
She enumerated: "From the advertising field, Yoly Ong (of Campaigns and Gray) and JJ Calero (of Zenith Optimedia). Fr. James Reuter represented the Catholic Church. There were also representatives from academe, media and NGOs, like Beth Diaz of the Concerned Women of the Philippines and Alice Villadolid, formerly of the Philippine Press Institute."
"Unesco is supporting [Pami's] move," Lazaro told Inquirer Entertainment, "because it believes in the power of media to influence and alter behavior, and effect change in society."
In a nutshell, Lazaro said the meeting was held to clarify what the Unesco "can do to help."
"What can we do to improve media?" Lazaro specified. "Upgrading the levels of competence is very important."
Davila, who was appointed as Unesco commissioner last year, agreed. "Among themselves, people in the entertainment industry should set standards and parameters for all the networks."
"Our system on television is self-regulation," Lazaro confirmed.
Self-regulation is preferred to censorship, a tool of the martial-law dictatorship, she emphasized.
Last week, the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board was put to task for issuing memorandum circular No. 07-05 which, lawmakers and journalists believe, would effectively muzzle media.
The circular requires prior state approval of public affairs programs on television.
If self-regulation works on hard news, Lazaro and Davila saw no reason why it couldn't work on so-called light entertainment fare.
In the news business, Davila remarked, broadcast journalists came up with a Media Nation seminar, where the stakeholders got together to thresh out issues and institute standards.
"Perhaps the entertainment industry should come up with its own Media Nation," Davila said.
Guide
Lazaro owned up: "We've been repeatedly told that the bottom line for media is revenues-how much the [media outfits] earn. Which is quite understandable because it is a business. You have to pay salaries. You have to compete in the market."
But in a landscape where competition is cut-throat, what could guide the average media practitioner?
"There is always the temptation," Lazaro acknowledged. "There's a fork in the road and you have to choose."
The buck stops with individual conscience, Davila reiterated, "because you are in the industry for something larger than yourself."
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>>============================== :-/
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