GMA does a TJ

THE PRESS is “critical to maintaining our strong democracy.”
So hailed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the role of media in her speech at the centennial celebration of the Philippines Free Press magazine Wednesday last week.
Quick and short was the President’s encomium to media. Quicker and longer was her opprobrium to them.
Said she: “In the words of Joseph Pulitzer: ‘A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce a people as base as itself. These are words of great precautionary value to those who seek shelter under the freedoms advanced by …Pulitzer and Locsin, but disdain the concurrent responsibilities on their part to be disinterested and public spirited.
“Freedom in the hands of those who want the freedom without the responsibility degenerates into a callous license to aspire to little more than gossipy headlines and inflated circulation numbers, no matter what cost must be paid in the debasement of public discourse.”
A searing indictment of media, the President slammed there. It was as though GMA placed the media on top of a pedestal only to kick its base to topple and break them to pieces.
The President’s latest take at media finds parallel with that of American President Thomas Jefferson’s.
No higher plaudits have ever been given the press than those of Jefferson’s.
Consider these passages in his Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1799: “To the press alone, checquered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”
And, the primacy of the press over government itself in his letter to Colonel Edward Carrington dated January 16, 1787: “…and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”
What place can be loftier for the press to be raised to than that which Jefferson set for it?
What place can be more abysmal for the press to be damned in than that which the same Jefferson set for it a few years later?
The towering intellect among US Presidents lamented to John Norvell on June 11, 1807: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle…Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st Truths, 2nd Probabilities, 3rd Possibilities, 4th Lies. The first chapter would be very short.”
And his searing damnation of the press, in a letter to Thomas Seymour and other citizens of Hartford, Connecticut dated February 11, 1807: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them: inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.”
What caused the plunge of the press in Jefferson’s estimation? The scandalmongering James Callender.
Dubbed “The Scoundrel,” Callender was employed by then Secretary of State Jefferson in his running conflict against Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Callender it was that exposed the affair of Hamilton with the married Mary Reynolds.
When Jefferson became president, Callender wanted the postal office as a sinecure for his services. Failing to get it, he turned on his former employer with scathing newspaper articles and pamphlets foremost of which was on the Jefferson fathering a child by the slavewoman Sally Hemings.
Then, as now, salacious scandals sell. And presidents – still remember JFK’s Marilyn Monroe caper and Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky affair? – do not have any immunity from exposure there. Thus, the periodic presidential thrashing of media.
In the case of our own GMA, well, what can I say? Scandals – from “Hello Garci” to the NBN-ZTE – exposed one after the other. But absolutely nothing bawdry there. Still, the pain caused on the President is worth some presidential digs at the press. That which media have to take as par for the course of give and…well, take.