When ‘good news’ is worse than bad news

Dec 26, 2005
Updated 00:48am (Mla time)
William Esposo wmesposo*hotmail.com
INQ7.net

IT was at the Pope’s summer residence in Castelgandolfo, a few miles away from Rome, where they held the NetOne International Media Congress a year ago which gathered media personages from five continents. I was then panel speaker and it was there where I advocated for more media coverage of the good news. However, I had then also taken exception to the fact that in many instances, even bad news is good news.

It is certainly bad news when you learn you have cancer. But bad news, as bad news can get, becomes a good thing when one gets to know the truth and its realities. As soon as one learns about the cancer, his whole system reconfigures itself into a psychological journey towards acceptance. It is in this acceptance that one eventually learns to adapt and prepare for the remedy or the inevitable.

If the bad news comes at the early stages of cancer, one is allowed to address and heal it. Otherwise, when the news comes too late and remedy is no longer an option, one still benefits from the news because it allows him to prepare himself and his family to cope with the inevitable. When this happens, the bad news of one’s existence becomes the good news of one’s spiritual liberation.

Cancer runs its course, regardless of whether or not you are aware of it. But there are certain ‘cancers’ that de-humanize and reverse the gains of the moral and spiritual man. This is the cancer that is created by man, the same type that Madame Arroyo flaunts with dexterity and craft. It is called the Cancer of the Big Lie.

Madame Arroyo’s lie-making machine is well-equipped and well-funded. When Madame Arroyo rants and raves about not getting her fair share of ‘good news’, she is actually expecting media to take reality and truth out of context so that they may convey her brand of ‘good news’ – the kind which covers up her sins and her lies. In effect, it is like asking for the censorship of information on the genocide of the Jews because it is too unspeakably abominable, never mind if society will not benefit from the value of knowing history. Many people could not believe that the Nazis under Hitler had murdered six million Jews between the latter part of the 1930s and early 1940s. In fact, revisionists and anti-Semitic elements today peddle the lie that the genocide was all part of an elaborate Jewish propaganda plan to gain sympathy and tolerance for the Jewish state’s Middle East expansion.

Such genocide happened because there was a successful subversion of the truth. A similar genocide would have gone unchecked in the Balkans during the 1990s had world media not exposed the atrocities that were being committed during that conflict.

Among those who supposedly knew about the Jewish Holocaust and did not denounce it was then Pope Pius XII. The long historical feud between Catholics and Jews fueled this perception. In fact, the late Pope John Paul II apologized for the historical offences that the Catholic Church had done to the Jews in Europe and in the Holy Land during the Crusades which were anything but holy. One wonders if Bishop Fernando Capalla and Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales are aware of the late Pope’s apology and dedication to the truth. They seem to be comfortable with the subversion of the truth about the alleged rape of democracy here last May 2004.

One of the reasons why the Philippine economy made a swift nosedive during the Marcos dictatorship was because he tightly controlled information and media. For over a decade, we were fed ‘good news’ that hardly anybody challenged, save for a few brave souls like Ninoy Aquino. We were told that all was well and looking up but in truth, the cancer of the big lie had all along been consuming our economic, social and moral fiber. By the time we got rid of Marcos, picking up the pieces of our disintegrated sense of nationhood and vigilance for the common good had become as impossible as re-assembling the yellow pages that had been turned into People Power confetti. All the tyrants and despots of the world want to control this truth-dispensing machine called media. For them, only their agenda matters and they will use lies and half-truths to achieve their objectives. Naturally, a free press will be the nemesis of tyrants. But in our so-called ‘democracy’ where freedom can assume the mold of being irresponsibly licentious and irreverently bold, inglorious leaders can only resort to stealth tactics and manipulation of media.

Clamoring for ‘good news’ is a cheap way of making media go out of their way to seek the odd-man-out nice stories, even if these stories are not representative of reality. Paying editors and any other media practitioner willing to compromise their integrity for a fast buck, is another, albeit more expensive way.

What makes it worse is that while all forms of distortions of the truth take place in our milieu, we find Filipinos only too willing to play along in delusional oblivion. Delusion has become a national malaise that has turned into a coping mechanism in dealing with lies, lies and more lies. Instead of facing the truth and accepting reality, we take the cowardly path of staying in denial. Madame Arroyo’s pressure on media to highlight the ‘good news’ gets the approval of some sectors of society who do not relish hearing the ‘bad news’ – especially when this calls attention to their responsibility to set things right.

Subscribing to the saying that ‘no news is good news’ is an indication of a mind in denial. We grow with the accumulation of information and knowledge. The absence or deficiency of it makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Of the main distinctions that separate the masses from the upper class, one is the amount of information and knowledge in their heads. The money in their wallets is but a manifestation of that knowledge gap.

Former Marcos information minister, Kit Tatad, admitted that the dictatorship intentionally applied an ‘idiotization’ media policy to ensure that the Filipinos know less of the truth. This is intended to make it easier to control the subjugated nation. These days, Madame Macapagal-Arroyo is attempting to survive efforts to rectify the stealing of the 2004 elections by obfuscating and muddling the issues.