BAGUIA
War and metaphorical wars tend to victimize the truth. This has happened in what the Philippine government calls its war against drugs. The assault on truth is manifest in several ways.
I have written in my last two columns against letting our minds be hijacked into talk of war in our common effort to address our nation’s drug problem.
Two weeks ago, I wrote that we should avoid a war language and mentality that abet warlike action at a time when we need more than ever to see one another as neighbors, the direct and indirect victims of drug addiction as our brothers and sisters, and a health-based approach as the solution.
Last week, I wrote that Philippine initiation of a “drug war” fails the “just war” doctrine just as American participation in the two Gulf Wars did because it rests on distortions of communication, language and thought in the public sphere.
These failures can be understood using at least two of the concepts from Norman Fairclough, eminent proponent for critical analysis of discourse in a democratic context.
The concepts are regulative practice and spaces of emergence.
Regulative practice, according to Fairclough, refers to the openness of a media environment to various stakeholders. It is all about the level of hospitality media users or practitioners offer to different persons within settings of their practice.
Strong regulative practice means the conversation is stringently framed while weak regulative practice means more people join the conversation.
There is little, if any, framing.
Strong regulative practice is not open to joint management of the conversation while weak regulative practice means that actors in a mediatized conversation manage it together.
Years ago, when the editorial offices of the Inquirer Group were still on Escario Street in uptown Cebu City, a note was posted on one corkboard to remind reporters about the groups of people whose voices must be represented in any news story. Several groups were listed, starting with government authorities all the way to people in the streets.
The internet is a promising platform for weakening regulative practice in democratic discourse. Effectively unlimited space in news websites means journalists have no reason not to let as many relevant sources as possible speak in a story.
Our politically charged climate, however, has slowed the media’s journey to the land of promise.
There is no dearth of well-written journalism that represents many voices in legitimate digital news outlets.
But instead of contributing to level-headed discourse, people and bots have been using comments boxes there as spaces for bitter verbal jousts.
At the same time, news articles and institutions are routinely subjected by partisans to useless critique.
Worse, digital outlets have arisen that enable the demonizing of legitimate media organizations and journalists and channel skewed constructs of reality.
In the face of fanatical social media accounts and fake news websites that misrepresent the truth and pillory dissenters, the internet has become a space of fortified smaller public spheres at war with one another.
No wonder regulative practice has been tightened in legitimate media sites with such measures as Rappler’s stricter moderation of comments and Al-Jazeera’s closure of their comments boxes.
My impression is that in the media in general, those from the medical and allied professions need to speak up for both crime and “‘drug war’ as crime” victims.
Religious leaders, teachers, students, lawyers, human rights advocates and artists, among others, have joined the conversation and spoken against the ongoing carnage.
We need a louder word of life from our healers.
As late as June this year, Health Secretary Paulyn Ubial, who admitted in 2016 that the drug problem is a public health emergency, said the nation is still at a loss as to what much-needed community-based rehabilitation looks like.
It is high time for doctors and health professionals to speak their minds and provide the government with a clear picture.
They should be at the forefront of campaigning for compassion for the sick and for special protection for our young and vulnerable especially now when cops are encouraged to have no second thoughts about wasting them.
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