World Communication Day 2008  
By Lito Zulueta
May 11, Villa San Miguel

I MUST confess that when the 2008 World Communication Day Message was released last Jan. 24, I was at a loss on how to discuss it with my Catholic Journalism class in UST. Its immediate message eluded me. What does the message mean by “crossroads,” and why “crossroads between self-promotion and service”? What does “self-promotion” mean? Does it refer to media promoting themselves? For what ends? Or does the message mean the media’s promotion of it own interest? If “self-promotion” means media’s selfish interest or profit motivation, why should there be “crossroads” between it and public service? Wouldn’t a better word be “conflict” as in the media’s “conflicted” role of promoting its interest while purporting to serve the public good?

But there’s no confusion with the subtitle of the message: “Searching for the Truth in order to Share It with Others.” The title reaffirms the role of social communication as a mechanism and channel for the truth, as a culler and conveyor of the truth that can foster solidarity and liberation. The title reaffirms that media’s foremost role is truth-telling for social spirit.

Like most of Church documents on social communication, the 2008 message gives media a pat in the back and a rap in the knuckle: while recognizing media’s contribution “to the diffusion of news, to knowledge of facts and dissemination of information,” and the decisive role they have played in spread of “literacy and socialization, as well as the development of democracy and dialogue among peoples,” they also “risk being transformed into systems aimed at subjecting humanity to agendas dictated by the dominant interests of the day” and are “used for ideological purposes or for the aggressive advertising of consumer products.” Worse, “Today communication seems increasingly to claim not simply to represent reality, but to determine it, owing to the power and the force of suggestion it possesses.” Since the mass media have become an “integral part of the ‘anthropological’ question, and communication appears to be losing “its ethical underpinning and eludes society’s control,” then there may be a need for “info-ethics,” the better for the media to avoid becoming a “spokesman for economic materialism and ethical relativism.”
There’s no gainsaying that a new info-ethics is needed. But there should be an acknowledgement and an appreciation that the complexion of social communications has vastly changed. There should be a recognition that part of the confusion in ethics in the media has something to do with the rapid development of media technologies for the past two decades or so.

McLuhan and other philosophers of communicative form basically say that media technologies develop or overlap into one another, manifested by the shift across several centuries from oral to written culture, from written to print culture. Generally speaking, written and print culture has fostered literacy, linear and abstract thinking, logic and rationality, education and the rise of universities, interiority and democracy, the rise and fall of civilizations, even the rise of nation-states in the last two centuries.
Advancements in communications technology do not take place in a social vacuum. And social shifts and turmoils have as much to do with science and technology as they do with the merry brew of politics and economics.

Suffice it to say that communications technology has resulted in public expression and public ways of thinking. In short, communicative form has a bearing on public discourse. And public discourse, as we know it now, is a product of print.
What’s the significance of public discourse? In the context of a democracy, public discourse is needed in order to determine the truth or reality of issues and events, and chart a path toward their correction or solution. Public discourse is needed to define the problem and seek a solution. It is a public exchange, a market of ideas and a democratic form of problem-solving.

But technology has a bearing on public discourse. As Neil Postman, a student of McLuhan, says, “. . . a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.”
Considering the decline of print and the rise of television, has there been a major epistemological shift? Have there been created new forms of truth-telling?
Postman says yes, but he only has harsh words for the truth-telling of television: “I believe the epistemology created by television is not only inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist.” He does not hide his alarm that print is on a decline as a result of the mighty reach of television. He seems to have only disdain for television: the title of his book is “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.”

Broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite roughly makes the same damning condemnation of what I may call as television’s epistemological banality:
“For those who either cannot or will not read—equally shameful in a modern society—television lifts the floor of knowledge and understanding of the world around them. But for the others, through its limited exploration of the difficult issues, it lowers the ceiling of knowledge. Thus, television news provides a very narrow intellectual crawl space between its floor and ceiling.”

For Cronkite, television is a poor substitute to the newspaper in fostering healthy public discourse and forming sound public opinion; in fact, like Postman, he admits that television can be dangerous to democracy:
“The major problem is simply that television news is an inadequate substitute for a good newspaper. It is not too far a stretch to say that the public’s dependence on television for the bulk of its news endangers our democratic system. While television puts all other media in the shade in its ability to present in moving pictures the people and the place that make our news, it simultaneously fails in outlining and explaining the more complicated issues of the day.”

In categorically stating that television news is a poor substitute for printed news, Cronkite shows the technological determinism of what he calls the “informational dilemma.” Elsewhere in his memoirs, he talks about “recognizing the advantages and limitations of each medium.” Therefore, if print were a better source of information, what would be the innate advantage of television? Postman has the answer: television has given rise to the “age of show business.” In short, television is for entertainment. Even information is “showbizzified” or becomes entertainment on television; it becomes “infotainment.” As Cronkite says about network bosses tinkering with TV journalism: “They’d rewrite Exodus to include a car chase.”

Does that mean that television should be left to the devices of circus people and entertainers? For all intents and purposes, that’s what seems to have been obtaining, but Postman, despite admitting that television is technologically determined to be the haven of entertainment and escapism, warns against that prospect, since television, like all communication technologies, has the power to make and unmake cultures and civilizations. To borrow a perspective from the culturalist-materialist approach, television is a “culture industry.” As Postman warns:
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpertual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clean possibility.”
But that entertainment capitalists have practically taken over television has been firmly established. Calling for a “new communications era” in which news and public affairs would be renovated and recharged, Cronkite poses the question: “whether the major players in the new alignment—the entertainment and industrial giants—with no background in news and their focus primarily on profits from other sources, will be willing to underwrite the budget-bending business of serious news reporting. Will they continue even the level of reduced news and public affairs programming that their networks are providing today?”

In any case, television cannot just be for amusement and diversion. Like print, it should be a channel for truth-telling. Television should fulfill the social functions of the press, which are information and entertainment, and according to that strict order and priority. But since print seems to have a lock on the information dimension, television should learn from print the best practices of truth-telling. #