The Media and Peace Reporting

INTRODUCTION

I[eilledia and Peace BeRofting Most efforts in the field ofjournalism education and training lie in the development of skills, skills in news gathering and reporting, or in other aspects of newspaper publishing and news program production. They deal with the how-to of the craft or trade. Universities and collegesprovide courses in these areas. With rapid changes in technolory, many areas of coverage require continuing review and adjustment. What is not so obvious is the need for journalists to keep up with the changing context of the news. Journalists need to acquire the necessarybackground ofevents they cover, to add to their fund of knowledge and information so that they can understand more fully why events have come to pass and the issues reflected in various developments of society This need is easily ignored by journalists and editors who are immersed in the daily news grind, whose objective is simply to try and get the facts straight and fast. The pace of news gathering and delivery can sideline the need for context and interpretation. News analysis is left only to a selected few. But it is our belief that every news account should involve the iournalist in thinking out the story and its meaning. When the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) was established in 1989, it carved out a special area of journalism training that would focus on the analysis and understanding of issues. In a period of political ferment in which the recovery of democratic institutions was taking place, it was obvious that journalists needed assistance to ground themselves quickly in the background of issues that figured in the events of the day. Its funding mandate allowed the Center to organize background briefings for journalists in the following areas: the findings of the Davide commission, the report of the council for conversion of the Military Bases, the Rp-US negotiations on military bases and electoral reform in 1992, among others.

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Late in 1994, CMFR joined the efforts of a group which called itself Alliance for Peacecommunicators (APC),an informal collaboration with media-oriented NGos and individual journalists, including Ricardo Puno, Radio Veritas, Jesuits in Communication, Inc., and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. As journalists and communftators, members of the group agreed that the media had a role to play in the peace process' At the time, the government had launched a comprehensive program for national reconciliation, a news development that urged the group to explore the possibilities of developing "peacereporting" as a way of covering conflict and adversarial negotiations. While APC remained only a name, the work it started projected the importance of the national program for peace as well as the significance of the media coveragein promoting an environment favoring peace. In over a year, funding from government agencies enabled the APC to organize five seminar workshops to update journalists on the peace program of the Philippines, on NGO peaceefforts as well as discuss their difficulties in covering the peace process. In these sessions,journalists voiced their own aspirations for peace and their willingness to do their part to cover those aspects of the peace process that were ignored in mainstream media such as the civilian efforts to build up "peace zones." But "peace-reporting" was strange ground for most of them. There was no such beat to cover, for one thing; and it would take time to search out sources who would provide the community's perspective of peace. But, significantly, journalists as publishers, editors and reporters were ready to hear out the problem, to listen and to learn. The issue of how media should report acts of terrorism, negotiations or events in the field of combat has raised contentious debate within the journalistic community. The news agenda should be an independent process, seeking out the facts without external influence. And yet, journalists will be the first to admit that reporting can fan the flames of racial hatred and historic feuds. Worse, contending sides can use the media to conduct their war of words, the force of which can still result in hardening the will against agreements to lay the ground for peace. The character of news also drives journalists to limit their stories to those of conflict and calamity. Given a peace program, their attention will pick up more on the adversarialconfrontation, clwell on the collapse in negotiations, report the breakdown on talks while ignoring the breakthroughs made toward agreement and consensus.

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A starting point for media training, this book acis on the readiness of the media to improve their own understanding of the issues of peace and the complex questions raised in the course of negotiations. The idea of the publication was conceived as one book. In the process of assigning chapters, a three-part volume began to take shape. The wealth of knowledge and experience of the writers were such as to require an expanded book. The richness of material demanded a division of tome. The hrst part (Book 1) is set apart for its singular point of view. President Corazon Aquino and President Fidel Ramos made extraordinary commitments to building peace. President Aquino established the PeaceCommission which pursued initiatives in a very difficult period of transition. President Ramos continued the process with enlarged mandates given to the National Unification Commission and later the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the PeaceProcess. Through the period of democratization, national leadership had recognizedthe deeply rooted causes of conflict as issues calling for resolution. Government did make a commitment to address the grievancesof so many in the populace. The mandate for peace involved tasks at many levels, programs involving multi-agency coordination and cooperation with non-government peaceworkers. The response of the government to the issues of conflict and peace involved both long- and short-term strategies. Book I is a record of that response. It reviews the process of establishing a comprehensive national program to build up peace on all the fronts where government troops have had to fight off their fellow Filipinos. It traces the thinking which governed the approach to negotiations for each insurgent or rebel group, the Communist Party of the Philippines-National Democratic Front, the military rebel groups of Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) and the Young Officers Union (YOU) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). The writer of this volume, Maria Lorenza Palm-Dalupan, is a political anthropologist by training. Taking a break from her studies at the University of Michigan in 1986, she was drawn to the challenge of democratization and political transformation in government work. During the Aquino Administration, she worked as Deputy Commissioner of the PeaceCommission. Later, during the Ramos term, she was Executive Director of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP)Secretariat. The official record takes into account the problems and

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