EDITORIAL - Blessed are the president's men

Big media players in the Philippines cannot go on an extended honeymoon with the president and his administration. They risk betraying their public mandate if they continue allowing themselves to be used in attacking and exposing his enemies and then play cozy and coy when it comes to his allies and friends caught in similar situations and controversies.

The world is in shock right now over the barbaric attack by Islamic terrorists on a Paris magazine that killed its editor and several other journalists, an act so jarring it unwittingly focused the light more intensely on what role the media really play in society that journalists have to often risk their lives just to pursue the calling.

At least, in the sickening Paris incident, it has been made unequivocally clear what the slain journalists strove and eventually died for. The same cannot be said as unequivocally about the media in the Philippines, especially in light of the increasingly clear bias that comes into play in the treatment of the president's enemies, vis a vis his allies and friends.

The Philippine media are quick to go to town when it comes to allegations of corruption involving presidential enemies, or those perceived to be beyond the president's sphere of political influence. In fact, not only will they take the circus into town, they will book it for as long as there is a single soul willing to keep up with and warm a single seat in the show.

But when it comes to the president's allies and friends, there is no similar fanfare and festive air. There is a respectful, almost sacred, deference to the personalities involved. There is a subdued presentation of the news, never mind if the news involves far greater amounts in alleged anomalies, supposedly committed for far more scandalous and obnoxious reasons and motivations.

Take for example the red flags raised by the Commission on Audit on the Department of Social Welfare and Development's handling of billions upon billions of pesos in calamity funds and cash doleouts ostensibly meant for the poor. The news hardly made the headlines, if at all. And it did not stay long on the bill. No circus erupted. No fiesta ensued. When Dinky Soliman of DSWD said she was willing to be investigated, that was it. That was as far as Philippine media went with the story.

Soliman is, of course, a very close ally of the president. To the big media players in the Philippines, it was as if that was all that mattered. It didn't seem important to them that what were apparently involved were funds meant to address the misery of calamity victims and the poverty of those in the fringes of society. In the hierarchy of skewed values, depriving those who lost everything or who have nothing seems far less evil than plain duplicity and common greed.