Veejay Villafranca for the International Herald Tribune
Inday Espina-Varona talks about her experiences as a journalist at a conference at De La Salle University in Manila. Ms. Espina-Varona has been a journalist since the Marcos era and now runs the citizen-journalism program of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest broadcast network.
By CARLOS H. CONDE
Published: May 16, 2011
MANILA — When a panel of executives from the Philippines’ top broadcasting networks defended their industry last September before legislators examining the news media’s conduct during a botched hostage rescue, the fact that four of the five executives were women attracted little comment. But it spoke volumes about the change the country’s journalism has undergone in recent decades, from an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession to one where women now hold sway.
The watershed came in the last few years of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled for nearly two decades and was toppled in a popular revolt in 1986. When Mr. Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, many of the mostly male editors and reporters who were critical of him were imprisoned or went underground to join the resistance. The men who remained in the newsrooms were often co-opted by the government or operated clandestinely to put out opposition publications.
Into the breach came the women, who up to then had been largely sidelined in feature supplements or less consequential jobs. For the first time, they took over key positions in news organizations. In several instances, they directly challenged the government with reports and commentaries that contributed to the groundswell of opposition against Mr. Marcos.
Today, these women and the ones they hired and promoted dominate the country’s largest broadcast networks, its most influential newspapers and magazines, and investigative journalism nonprofit organizations.
“You cannot explain the rise of the women journalists without talking about martial law,” said Inday Espina-Varona, a journalist since the Marcos era who now runs the citizen-journalism program of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest broadcast network. “When the men were struggling back into journalism, the women were already there.”
The Marcos dictatorship had a “radicalizing effect” on many women in the Philippines, especially journalists, Belinda A. Aquino, a historian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wrote in the 1994 book “Women and Politics Worldwide.”
Lourdes Molina-Fernandez, managing editor of the Web site Interaksyon and the former editor in chief of Business Mirror, a Manila paper, said: “That period a few years right before Marcos fell — that was the time when women gained ascendancy in the newsroom because of the sheer preponderance of women writing very critical articles against the dictatorship.” She herself was fresh out of college at the height of the dictatorship and worked for anti-Marcos and leftist publications.
To be sure, women in the Philippines had advanced faster than their counterparts elsewhere in Southeast Asia, one reason perhaps that the U.N. Global Gender Gap Report last year called the Philippines a model for the region. Women were represented in the Senate before World War II, for instance, and many schools were run by women.
But somehow this was not reflected in newsrooms during these periods, said Luis V. Teodoro, a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. While there had certainly been some female journalists, the Filipino newsroom was dominated by men well into the Marcos years, he said.
The women who have since taken over advanced under the most arduous circumstances, when censorship was widespread and journalists were routinely arrested and tortured, a trial by fire that may have contributed to the assertiveness of the women-led news organizations to this day.
“It took a woman to test the limits of press censorship under Marcos,” said Ms. Aquino, the historian (and no relation to President Benigno S. Aquino III).
That woman was Maria Ceres Doyo, a human rights advocate who in 1980 wrote an article about a tribal chieftain, Macli-ing Dulag, who led his people in resisting a dam project and was killed by the military.
“Nobody was writing about it, so I wrote it, took my own pictures and sent it to the editor of Panorama, whom I did not know,” Ms. Doyo said. In hindsight, she said, “Maybe I was half stupid or half brave.”
Panorama was the Sunday magazine of Bulletin Today, a newspaper notorious as part of the “crony press” of Mr. Marcos. But its independent-minded editor, Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc, decided to run Ms. Doyo’s story.
The government responded by calling in Ms. Doyo for interrogation. But this did not have the desired effect: Ms. Magsanoc came to her defense and, somehow emboldened, even wrote scathing editorials that, in Ms. Doyo’s words, “twitted Marcos and Imelda,” the dictator’s wife, in what had previously been considered a lightweight lifestyle magazine. Ms. Magsanoc was fired as Panorama’s editor in 1981, after publishing a column criticizing the government.
Official harassment continued. Domini Torrevillas-Suarez, who replaced Ms. Magsanoc at Panorama, and several of her female staffers were placed under military surveillance. Female journalists from other publications were also interrogated by the military, often under conditions, Ms. Doyo said, that mocked them.
The women fought back with more critical pieces about the government.
In 1983, several days after the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the opposition figure and father of the current president, Eugenia Apostol, who owned the lifestyle magazine Mr. & Mrs., started Mr. & Mrs. Special Edition. She says she was angered by the news blackout by pro-Marcos papers of Mr. Aquino’s funeral, which was attended by an estimated two million people.
“Gathering the Mr. & Mrs. staff, I announced a special funeral issue the very next day,” she recalled in a 2010 essay.
The weekly Mr. & Mrs. Special Edition ran highly critical political stories in the final years of the Marcos government.
In 1985, in response to what they believed was a government cover-up regarding the Aquino assassination, Ms. Apostol, along with Ms. Magsanoc, founded The Philippine Inquirer, a weekly. When Mr. Marcos announced a snap election late that year, they turned it into a daily, to give more coverage to the political opposition. The Philippine Daily Inquirer is now the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, and Ms. Magsanoc is editor in chief and Ms. Doyo a feature writer.
The Panorama episode was also a defining moment for Ms. Doyo. After her story on the dead tribal chieftain was published, she turned full time to journalism. “It was an amazing, wondrous journey,” she said.
The same could be said of the careers of the many other women who rose in journalism during the struggle against the Marcos government, among them Sheila Coronel, who founded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and is now director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University in New York.
“Every independent media group in the Philippines has been led by a woman,” said Maria Ressa, a former CNN correspondent who, until late last year, was senior vice president for news and current affairs at ABS-CBN. She was among the news executives who testified at the Senate hearing.
According to the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, a Manila-based media monitoring and research institution, women occupy the top or key positions in most of the country’s broadcast and print newsrooms. During Ms. Ressa’s six years at the network, 13 of the 15 people in news management were women.
The country’s top prize for investigative journalism, handed out by the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism, has gone to women in 15 of the past 21 years. More than 70 percent of enrollees in mass communications or journalism courses are women.
Melinda de Jesus, executive director of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, which published the Philippine Journalism Review, said the challenges now for the women-led newsrooms are to maintain editorial competence and independence and to keep pace with swiftly changing information technology.
But she also noted that, despite the journalists’ achievements in helping bring down an abusive government, many problems in Philippine society — poverty, corruption, ineffective governance — persist, and that the news media’s coverage of these issues “often lacks depth.” “The harder part is the development of quality journalism that the Filipino audience deserves,” she said.
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