Insights on the Ed Lingao link: A Retrospect of A Practitioner Gone AWOL
i was shared a link by my former colleagues in the communication industry back home, and then it struck me. almost a year away from the practice of communication education, and what has become of the media that i left behind?
i read through the narrative and found myself remembering all the theories, my classes in communication values & ethics, and the productions i did with my kids. i stumbled upon myself again, and started asking about who i was, really, and what type of communication kids did i produce inside those four walls. then i started asking, when the media decides to wage its own war, who would be there to curb it? with all the tenacity of what it has become - the sensationalism masking behind what is apprently a shotgun for ratings - how do we ensure that what we receive from the gatekeepers are well worth labeled and remains unbiased or objective? how yellow is yellow journ then?
has our media, as free as it is, found itself resorting to gore, yellow journ and circus reporting to equate itself as truthful, unabated and in the service of the masses? i feel that sadly, we have turned ourselves into barnum and bailey, either intentionally or otherwise. THIS is the media industry we leave our future practitioners with, telling them that THIS is how it should be. that is very sad. on these occasions, sometimes i even wonder why i tell people we have the best media practitioners in this side of asia.
and then i step back and look at what i do now - working as a practitioner in another segment of the industry, in another part of asia, trying to imbibe the filipino spirit of diligence into the work that we do. funny, at the end of the day, i still find myself thinking of back home - my wife and child, my kids from the school, my work as a communication educator, my practice - and still wonder how it would be like if our practice of the craft was better than what it has become now: flatulated, too gory, too objectively commodified, too disdain and saddening due to trends and treatment of news and feature selection.
what have i done as a practitioner? did i do any better? or was i a propagator of the same? i hope to find out soon. through the kids i have taught before, and those i still plan to teach in the future.
*To read Prof Lingao's note, please follow this link
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ed-lingao/media-goes-to-war/10150344744554639