In its Power to the People Wave 3 Report, Universal McCann found that of all countries in the world, the Philippines has the most number of Internet users belonging to a social network, whether Friendster, Multiply, Facebook or what have you. The top five countries are: the Philippines (83.1%), Hungary (79.9%), Poland (76.8%), Mexico (76.3%), and Brazil (75.6%).

Journalists figure prominently among social networkers. They attract many friends and contacts on these sites. But an article in the Society of Professional Journalists’ website raises the question: Should journalists connect with sources on Facebook, or other social networking sites? Should they be friends, even on a virtual level, with people they cover?

Here’s the article  “Facebook blurs the lines of friendship” by Andy Schotz in the SPJ site.

I’m stuck on the word “friend.” Friends get together to see movies, talk about their families, maybe swap secrets.

The people we cover should not be our friends. If they are, we shouldn’t cover them.

Sixteen years ago, my closest friend, Melissa Hale-Spencer, with whom I worked at a weekly newspaper in upstate New York, wrote a piece that stuck with me.

She was covering the startling bankruptcy of a popular auctioneer whose downfall was vigorously, blindly denied by his many supporters — people who were snookered and lost a lot of money through him.

Melissa had written a profile of the auctioneer and had been to his auctions. It was a grim, difficult demise for her to document.

When she said hello in a court hallway, the defiant auctioneer wouldn’t respond. “You aren’t anybody’s friend,” he told her.

She agreed, and later expanded on her role in a prize-winning column. (Read the full SPJ article.)

Among them are UP Journalism graduates Jessica Hermosa and Johanna Sisante, whose thesis was named the best produced by the Class of 2008 of the College of Mass Communication (CMC). Their thesis was titled “Seat of Power: An Investigative Study on the Legislative Motives of the Authors of the Biofuels Act of 2006.” Their thesis adviser was Prof. Yvonne Chua.

The thesis was published as a two-part investigative report by Vera Files, an online publication that produces in-depth articles on various issues.

Either the Class of 2008, the Centennial batch, is extremely gifted, or UP teachers have become more lenient and their standards have dropped.

Maintaining UP’s high standards is important if it wishes to remain the country’s premier academic institution. But UP graduates aren’t the best anymore. (My son, who worked at the human resources department of a tech company in Makati, talks about UP graduates who are rejected because they couldn’t pass company exams or couldn’t converse comfortably and confidently in English).

How sad. Aside from the fact that standards have fallen, morals too are loosening. Knowing what is right and what is wrong is something a UP graduate should know, but there are indications UP is producing graduates who don’t, going by what was heard during the 2008 Recognition Rites of the National College of Public Administration Governance.

Now it was time to hear from the graduate who had just finished her Ph.D.

She prefaced her speech by asking everyone to applaud her, since unlike her younger counterparts graduating with Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees, she said, no one had given any expression of approval or acknowledgment of her feat, obtaining the highest degree the institution could give: a doctorate in public administration.

The audience indulged her by clapping, but she didn’t seem satisfied. What she said next stunned some in the audience.

“Palakpakan n’yo ako at bibigyan ko kayo ng exemption sa number coding ng MMDA (Applaud me and I will exempt you from MMDA’s number coding scheme)!” blurted Dr Corazon Cruz, Assistant General Manager of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), one of NCPAG’s newest Doctors of Philosophy in Public Administration. As everyone in the audience knows, the MMDA is the agency of government enforcing traffic rules and regulations in Metro Manila, including the number coding scheme that mandates vehicles to stay off the road one day a week depending on the number their license plates ends in.

It sounded amusing and people did chuckle. But the implications of what Dr Cruz said and did eventually sunk in. Here was a government official who had supposedly spent years of study on public administration, trying to offer the audience the incentive (bribe would be more accurate) of an exemption from MMDA rules in exchange for applause. She was telling people she could break the rules if they did her a favor.

“Palakpakan n’yo ako at bibigyan ko kayo ng exemption sa number coding ng MMDA!” sounds frighteningly similar to “Iboto nyo ako at libre kayong lahat sa Philhealth!” or even “Iboto nyo ako at bibigyan ko kayo ng tax exemption!” The line embodies what people dislike about government.

And what is troubling too is that the people before her were not just any audience. They were graduates of the NCPAG, future public servants and leaders of the Philippine bureaucracy.

At that very ceremoy, previous speakers had all been lamenting corruption in government. Indeed, if there is one college that is supposed to study and solve corruption in government, it is the NCPAG, the college within the country’s premier academic institution specializing in governance and the strengthening of institutions so that these are made to work for the common good. Even if no one among the speakers really took the corruption bull by its horns, to borrow a cliché, there was some mention of it in all of the speeches.

The commencement speaker, 100-year-old Engr. Fernando Javier of the UP College of Engineering class of 1933, Mr Centennial himself, noted how different things now were from the 1930’s and 40s, and the huge problems the country was facing now, corruption among them.

The college’s magna cum laude graduate, Michelle Jimenez, talked about how idealistic young people like her and her co-graduates were unfazed by the ills plaguing the bureaucracy, and were committed to serving the government in the Philippines despite the lure of working abroad.

Ador Torneo, Dean’s lister from the M.A. class, reminded graduates that they had the millions of taxpaying Filipinos to thank for their education, and exhorted classmates to serve the people. He said the task ahead was daunting—rice was in short supply but corruption was everywhere. The worst thing that could happen, Torneo said, was for hope to fade and be replaced with despair.

Torneo described the NCPAG’s role when he said something to this effect: “May sakit ang bayan natin at kailangan natin itong gamutin. Kailangan ang mga doktor (Our country is ill and it needs treatment. It needs doctors).” NCPAG graduates, Torneo said, were supposed to be the doctors ministering to the ailing country’s needs.

And then came Dr Corazon Cruz, one of the oldest graduates, and a ranking government official at that. But she did not take the cue from those who spoke before her. Instead, she gave the audience a glimpse into the minds of people in government, how easily they could offer to break the rules, how they could make light of something like this, even in an innocent undertaking as making a speech at one’s graduation. What she said represented what NCPAG’s fresh graduates wanted to change—bribery, palakasan, connections. (Some graduates were mumbling about how what she said smacked of the use of political connections to get off the hook).

Dr Cruz is probably not one of those doctors Torneo was referring to, whom the country needs. If this is how public administration “doctors” think and behave, perhaps the public should not expect any recovery anytime soon. Filipinos can and should actually sue for malpractice.

(disclosure: I attended the NCPAG Recognition Rites as the parent of a BAPA graduate. My mind wasn’t able to absorb Dr Cruz’ main speech because i was chewing on her intro statement.).

A group of senior journalists have pooled their experience and expertise to form a group called VERA Files, which publishes in-depth reports, feature stories and news articles on various issues.

VERA Files is barely a month old, and if other journalism groups follow what is known as “non-profit journalism,”  VERA Files business model is “no Income Journalism”   VERA Files’ trustees are in it for love of the profession, recognizing the need for in-depth reporting in these troubling times.

The scene at the Manila Peninsula in Makati City after the surrender of Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim–police shoving reporters, photographers and network production staff into buses that would take them to police headquarters in Bicutan–showed the Arroyo government at its most repressive. In full view of television cameras, on primetime live, police and military officials showed neither recognition of nor respect for the ideal of a free press.

Members of the PNP’s Special Action Forces bound the hands of the production staff of ABS-CBN and tried clamping handcuffs on the rest, among them Ellen Tordesillas of Malaya and DJ Yap of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The Inquirer reports that some 50 members of the media were arrested. (The photo at left was taken by Ellen shortly after Lim and Trillanes walked out of the Makati courtroom during a hearing today. The photo appears in Ellen’s blog and is being used here with permission.)

While all this was happening, Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro was in the ABS-CBN studios being interviewed by Anchor Ted Failon, the interview serving as annotation to the scene that was unfolding. Teodoro spoke in a calm voice, in contrast to the urgency with which Failon and his co-anchor Korina Sanchez were reporting on the journalists’ arrests. After first disclaiming any involvement in the Peninsula affair which was a police operation, Teodoro nevertheless spoke about the arrests as though rounding up journalists was the most natural thing in the world.

The arrests were made, he said, simply “to determine the identities” of the media people. “Certain Magdalo people will pose as so and so,” Teodoro said, referring to the band of rebel soldiers who are the co-accused and supporters of Trillanes and Lim. He talked about the Magdalo as having evil designs and that the police were merely doing their jobs by rounding up the press to sniff out the impostors.

If military and police suspect Magdalo soldiers of trying to pass themselves off as reporters, that’s because it is military SOP to try to blend with the media. They do it all the time. If journalists can be embedded among soldiers during military operations, so can soldiers embed themselves among journalists.

Indonesian journalist Akhmad Kusaeni, in his Masteral Project submitted to the Asian Center for Journalism, wrote: “Major Gamal Hayudini of the AFP Civil Relations Service in Mindanao said the soldiers were trained in ‘actual radio and television reporting and they will do coverage regularly like the other mainstream media.’ Hayudini told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the ‘embedded troops’ program had nothing to do with spying on reporters, but was ‘simply intensifying the AFP’s campaign against terrorism.’”

Interior Secrertary Ronaldo Puno defended the arrests, telling editors and producers the journalists were in good hands. He seemed to smirk at the exact moment he said this during a live press conference. He also said there was nothing wrong with confiscating tape taken by TV news crews. This is all hogwash, and as Atty Marichu Lambino, UP Journalism Department teacher, said earlier today, never ever should the public accept this kind of reasoning and never must society allow journalists to be jailed. Journalists are the eyes and ears of the public and muzzling them is tantamout to binding, gagging and blindfolding the people to prevent them from knowing what is happening.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines has denounced the police and the military for treating the media as enemies of the state. “While we concede the PNP’s right to conduct a thorough investigation of a crime – and we do not dispute that the takeover of the Peninsula was a crime – the police ought to follow legal procedures. Invitations to questioning should be differentiated from coercion; journalists have the option to accept the invitation and, certainly, should be accorded the basic right to counsel,” the NUJP said.

While this blog supports the NUJP’s statement and adds its voice to the condemnation of media treatment at the Peninsula earlier today, I disagree on the point of “invitations to questioning.” It sounds as though it is right and natural for journalists to be “invited for questioning” when they happen to be at the scene of a crime. It is not. Journalists cover events and issues, crimes included, as independent and disinterested observers. What they know and see is out in the open–in the articles they write and the reports they broadcast. They should not be summoned for questioning as though they were ordinary witnesses to a crime. The police and military should do their work by painstaking investigation, and not by asking the media what they don’t know.

These are extraordinary times for us Filipinos. And there doesn’t seem to be anything ordinary in the lives of the 11 people who were killed in the bombing (was it a bombing or an accident?) of the Glorietta last Friday.

It’s the fourth day since the tragedy hogged the front page and we’ve been reading since of lives violently cut short, of people who nearly suffered the same fate, and of grieving and unbelieving relatives and friends. I resisted writing about this since so many people have already, until my husband Boyette mentioned that he didn’t want to read the papers anymore.

“So sad,” was all he could say after glancing at the headlines today. What saddens him are the stories of those who died–how ordinary, how common, how everyday–and yet it is this very ordinariness that now makes them extraordinary. They were just celebrating at a restaurant, he was just waiting for his wife to finish shopping, she was just supposed to check out some items at the mall. And then they were gone. We were doing those exact same things last week, weren’t we? The more he reads about them, the sadder he becomes. So he has resolved not to read them anymore, and instead opts for the other sections of the papers.

More such stories will surface, I am sure, because it is part of the journalist’s job to put a human face to the news. Reporters who tell the stories and choose the small but significant details in the life of each person struck down by that blast at Glorietta help us understand other people’s grief and anger.

True, so many bloggers have written about their own personal stories of being there that day and of feeling the earth shake, of seeing the roof cave in, and running toward safety. So many have taken pictures and video with their digital or cell phone cameras.

But the difficult and distasteful job of finding the victims and talking to their families still falls on the shoulders of the reporter from the newspaper, radio or television station. They will pry, eavesdrop on the sobbing and the quiet conversation, shove a microphone in people’s faces, barge in on the sorrow and possibly even bear the brunt of relatives’ anger at why this all had to happen to their loved ones.

It’s a difficult job but the reporter’s gotta do it. That’s what crosses my mind each time I read news reports that tell human stories, especially those that need to be told in times of tragedy.

As far as the journalist is concerned, no life is ordinary.

As I was going over more than a month’s work from these young people, I couldn’t help but marvel at the amount of energy and talent they put into their final television reports. Ok, so the video quality is a little bit low, but they persisted and struggled through the technical difficulties of our not-so-professional video facilities and obviously enjoyed doing their little pieces. We didn’t want to the reports to go unseen so we posted the stories on the class blog.

Here’s the report submitted by the group from The Guidon, anchored by Ryan Edward Chua, 2006 Palanca awardee for the Kabataan essay category and the paper’s Inquiry editor. The other group members were Austin Claude Alcantara, Paterno Esmaquel, Ayee Macaraig, Katrina Alvarez and Korinne Banal. They called their program “Stories From The Hill.” Here are Part I and Part II.

And then there was the three-person group with their program,”Reporter’s Homework,” whose executive producer was Karla Mesina, a writer for the Ateneo student publication Matanglawin. The anchors are Peter Imbong and Hazel Velasco. Here are Part I and Part II of “Reporter’s Homework.”

How ironic that a day after President Gloria Arroyo asked media to rally to her side, another Filipino journalist is hauled off to jail.

Jofelle Tesorio, former editor-in-chief of the award-winning Bandillo ng Palawan, was jailed at Camp Karingal in Quezon City despite having posted bail. Here’s the news alert issued by the National Union of Journalists:

Jofelle Tesorio, a former correspondent of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and editor of Bandillo ng Palawan, now with the Bangkok-based Asia News Network, is presently in jail despite having posted a P20,000 bail at a Quezon City court.

The libel case was filed by former Congressman Vicente Sandoval of Palawan for Tesorio’s article on the Camago-Malampaya Natural Gas Project in Palawan. The article came out in the January 20-26, 2003 issue of Bandillo ng Palawan.

Tesorio posted bail at around 9 a.m. this morning at the Quezon City Hall of Justice, then taken to Camp Karingal, also in Quezon City. She is now at the women’s detention hall.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) reiterates its position that libel, a criminal offense under the country’s Penal Code, should be decriminalized. Journalists should not be thrown behind bars for doing their jobs. And as shown in the countless libel cases filed by politicians against journalists, the libel law has also become a tool to harass media into silence.

Is this how we reward journalists like Jofelle, who toiled in the backwaters of Palawan where so many environmental stories need to be brought to the public’s attention? Apart from the libel and death threats they have to face, community journalists like Jofelle have to put up with low salaries and the problem of scrounging for funds to pay the printers.

In a paper she wrote for the Asian Center for Journalism of the Ateneo de Manila University where she obtained her MA in Journalism, Jofelle wrote about the hardships of putting out a provincial paper:

[Bandillo] has always been struggling to come up with weekly copies because of its limited financial means. It needs to pay the printer long-overdue accounts incurred during the last three years….

The city’s (Puerto Princesa’s) small population does not have a sizeable reading market that can keep newspapers afloat. Bandillo is being sold for P6.00 (US$.12) but the printing cost is about P12.00 ($.24). It is losing in terms of sales. Most of the money local businesses spend on advertising goes to radio stations.

The only reason Bandillo has survived is because of extrajudicial notices. These are court-approved notices that need to be printed before they become legally-binding. To better collect funds, we made it a policy not to release a certificate of publication unless the cost of publication is paid in full. However, it is not all business—Bandillo always gives way to pakiusap (favors) from people who are short of cash needed to pay the court-approved fees.

And because Bandillo is a small newspaper, it has become vulnerable to attacks by powerful people. In the same paper, Jofelle wrote about the libel case that caused her arrest:

In 2003, then Palawan Representative Vicente “Brown” Sandoval became a subject of criticisms from Bandillo because of his positions on various issues such as the shares Palawan is supposed to earn from the Camago-Malampaya Natural Gas Project and other proposed legislations. Sandoval’s position on these issues was considered self-serving because he was seen as protecting his family’s businesses.

To shield himself from further criticisms that would affect his candidacy the following year, Rep. Sandoval filed three counts of libel against Bandillo at the Regional Trial Court of Quezon City. Sandoval sought P75 million ($1.554 million) in damages.

This is when the harassment began. Since the paper didn’t have funds to pay for lawyers, the staff had to draft the counter-affidavit themselves. One charge was dismissed, one was archived and the other is pending in court.

With the help of the Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists (FFFJ) and the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), the Bandillo staff were able to post bail and secure the services of a pro-bono (free) lawyer who would represent us in Manila.

But cases like libel take a lot of energy, time, money and effort. We had to fly to Manila whenever there was a hearing. On January 27, 2007 (four years after the complaints were filed), Mr. Sandoval agreed to withdraw the criminal case by submitting an Affidavit of Desistance to the court. In exchange, Bandillo published a public apology on its January 29-February 4, 2007 issue. The former congressman also asked for free political advertisements in Bandillo for his campaign this year.

However, this particular case is still pending in court because the judge did not honor the Affidavit of Desistance.

Based on Jofelle’s story, it seems both parties already reached a settlement. Yet, how come the judge did not honor it and still issued a warrant for Jofelle’s arrest?

Yesterday, President Arroyo told media executive wants to leave behind a legacy when she retires from being Chief Executive and asked for their help in doing so. But one thing that journalists will surely remember is the deplorable way they were treated while she was in power.

That Filipino is Oscar Barcelona Tan, a graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Law Class of 2005. Tan is an associate of the ACCRA Law Office in Manila who went on study leave to pursue his Master of Laws degree at Harvard.

Philippine News published Tan’s address, entitled “Like wine in the river, like citizens of the world.” Here’s an excerpt:

Dean Kagan, Vice-Dean Alford, professors, classmates, families, and friends. Let me first thank our tireless graduate program staff. They were the first friendly faces who greeted me, told me which functions offered free food, and what to do if you faint during your final exams. Assistant Dean Jeanne Tai, Nancy Pinn, Heather Wallick, Curtis Morrow, Jane Bestor, Chris Nepple, April Stockfleet: This year would not have been possible without you.

But this goes to everyone: Thank you all for truly making us feel part of this community. We LLMs became your fellow students after your Salsa Party, Chinese and Korean New Year, African Night, and our International Party. To honor you, we took Europe by storm, winning in the inaugural Negotiation Challenge, in the European Law Moot Court, and in the Willem Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Court. Of course, you truly become part of Harvard Law School when you’re featured in the Parody.

Not so long ago, Cambridge seemed a strange, unfriendly place especially when I first saw Gropius. I went to John Harvard’s with the British, who began chittering in an alien language. I later discovered it was actually English – the real English. I complained I was not used to cold, but a Saudi Arabian reminded me that you can fry eggs on a sidewalk in Riyadh. An Italian gave me tips on women because Italian men are the world’s greatest lovers, with the disclaimer that their style does not work on American women. A Malaysian was asked to explain the religious significance of the color of her hijab, or headscarf. She would answer: It had to match her blouse.

Read the rest at the Philippine News website.