Blogging has become a force to be reckoned with in the fight for democracy and against corruption in the Philippines. The latest massive push to remove President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for corruption and election-rigging has been largely driven by journalists and activists who have been denied the use of the traditional media by legal restraints from the Arroyo administration.
This is the first time a crisis of this kind has been fought on the information highway instead of the avenues of Manila and the traditional response of police and army has shown its self useless.
The Australian newspaper The Age describes it this way:
This revolution is all about control of information. The election-fixing allegations center on taped phone calls allegedly between the President and an electoral commissioner, Virgilo Garcilliano. When the allegations surfaced in early June, threats from the Arroyo administration stopped the mainstream media from publishing the contents because the calls had been illegally recorded.
This created an on-line blog bonanza...
The Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism was also crucial in the on-line campaign. The centre first aired the three-hour tape of the conversations, offering it as a download on its website in early June.
The lynch-pin of Filipino blogging is the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism and their blog "inside PCIJ". The blog and the use of interactive information dissemination is a direct result of a SIDA [eng.] financed course called " The Electronic Research and Publishing programme", given by The Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, JMK, Stockholm University. [Yes, I teach the course with a colleague.]
When Yvonne Chua, training director for the Center, came to our course she new nothing about blogging. After a week she had grasped the political and journalistic implications and grappled with the technology. Before she left us she was convinced that blogging was important. When she got home it took some convincing on her part to get the organization on board, but they did and the results can now be seen influencing journalism and democratic development throughout Asia.
I am proud to have played a small part in this development.
Hi Mark! Remember me? I attended the SIDA sponsored course on Online Journalism together with Yvonne of PCIJ in 2004.
Anyway, at that time my news organization, Newsbreak Magazine, was only a content provider for INQ7.net.
We finally launched our own website very recently. Hope you will take time to check it out: www.newsbreak.com.ph.
It's just a soft launch so far. The website is still very basic. But there are a lot of plans on how to develop it in the coming months.
Would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for all the inputs we got from you guys while there in Stockholm. You might say this new venture of ours is also a direct result of that experience.
Posted by: Gemma Bagayaua | March 23, 2006 at 14:48