This is the full text of the keynote speech of Howie Severino at PCIJ’s Third National Conference on Investigative Journalism. He is the chairman of the PCIJ Board of Editors.
So happy to see everyone. Feels like a reunion!
I want to start by showing you a short video. Just don’t believe everything you hear.
I think we’ve seen enough. Nakakainis na hehe.
Medyo nakakainsulto kasi sabi nito hindi na ako nakakalakad, eh nagbibisikleta pa ako araw-araw.
But it’s actually scary how believable it is, how gullible the public has become, and how we seem powerless to stop this growing danger.
By the time i learned about it two weeks ago, this fake sales video had several thousand views. Who knows how many actually bought this product. Will they blame the pitch man if the drug doesn’t work or worse, poisons them?
The original video was from my podcast, and manipulated with a manufactured voice that could sound like me if you don’t listen closely.
Many of us are still grappling with disinformation that was scaled up several years ago with fake headlines on Facebook and lies spread in YouTube videos. Journalists the world over responded with slow fact-checking and feeble attempts at making facts as viral as lies. We will eventually realize that was all child’s play.
Because now we have deep fakes.
I’m far from the only victim of course. Several news anchors have been seen in fake and believable videos selling various products. That’s also child’s play compared to what we’re bracing ourselves for — the election campaign and fake videos where we’re maligning people or inventing scandals or pronouncing dignitaries dead.
Then there’s peril on a different scale: The recent deep fake of the president ordering the armed forces to take action against another country.
Malacañang quickly released a statement declaring it fake. What if some powerful people, even foreign governments, reacted as if it were true?
This is the world being created by Artificial Intelligence where it may become next to impossible to tell the diffwerence between truth and falsehood.
But a wise man once said, impossible is not a fact, just an opinion. This conference is all about the possibility of solutions.
AI is just the latest challenge facing journalists, who are duty-bound to ferret out the truth in a world of dubious information.
Veteran journalist Howie Severino delivers the keynote speech at the Third National Conference on Investigative Journalism
When I began to attend conferences like this I was one of the youngest in the room.
I’m now one of the few active journalists left who began working during the first Marcos presidency. Like many others back then, I know what it’s like to be inside a jail cell for performing our duty.
The role of journalists in the restoration of democracy in 1986 was considered so crucial our freedom to do our job was enshrined in the Constitution.
And we were so influential that we didn’t need to be called influencers because that was a given. We were the gatekeepers of public information. If you wanted your voice heard you had to go to the media. Of course media was not always fair, but it was much better than government propaganda, which had a minuscule audience compared to the flourishing media community in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Government took us seriously and generally respected us.
I recall then President Fidel Ramos inviting the PCIJ staff to Malacañang for a dialogue with him and his senior officials after we began to produce investigative reports on his administration.
It was certainly not to wine and dine us because I don’t even recall any food. That gracious meetup was simply an attempt by two influential institutions — one big and one tiny nonprofit — to understand each other. We came away from the meeting with a greater respect for each other’s roles, even if it sometimes had to be adversarial. FVR would get upset by our reporting, but not once did he threaten us or publicly cast doubt on our integrity.
In those days, investigative journalism was new to most Filipinos and considered part of the fresh air of democratic freedom. People believed it and took it seriously, reproduced it and discussed it. And when a bombshell dropped, the impact could be massive, such as when the PCIJ produced a series of reports on corruption that led to the fall of Pres Joseph Estrada in 2001.
The PCIJ’s executive director of 17 years, Sheila Coronel, won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2003 for her pioneering efforts in leading this little non profit.
How the world has changed; in some ways it’s upside down.
From being heroic truth seekers journalists are now accused of being purveyors of fake news or agents of spy agencies.
Journalists have been demonized and trolled. The Philippine is still a notorious global leader in media killings.
There’s a looming threat we’re facing today that poses another kind of death — and that’s irrelevance. We never had to doubt our relevance and influence before, and the rants against us in the recent past from the country’s highest office were somehow perverse proof that we were still important.
But the 2022 election was the first time when a leading candidate did not bother to participate in a public debate organized by the press, and did not even have to face any journalists asking tough questions.
He showed the political community that it was a winning strategy. In this milieu, journalists don’t need to be threatened any more, because we can simply be ignoredand considered just part of the noise.
This concern is being played out on many levels. Just recently in Bohol, a new resort with an Olympic-sized pool in the fabled Chocolate Hills was closed for violating environmental laws. Some wondered why we had just learned about this desecration.
But way back in August of last year, one of our media colleagues here from Cebu, Keicent Magsumbol, produced a classic three-part investigative report in the newspaper The Freeman that thoroughly examined the record of this resort, a bombshell in previous eras. There was a tepid response, and the resort continued operating.
Early this year, a travel vlogger flew a drone over the resort, and posted the video on Facebook while pronouncing his experience there as “relaxing.” The video prompted public outrage, senators weighed in with condemnation and their own investigation, and the DENR finally took action. The resort is now closed indefinitely.
There are lessons to be gleaned from this example and I don’t want to pre-empt the discussions that Caecent and others will be having.
But I like to think that the virtues of diligence and rigor required to do investigative reporting were alive in that report and alive in many of us gathered here today.
We just need to rethink how we package and distribute our valuable work so it creates the impact that it deserves.
The tireless efforts of our executive director Carmela Fonbuena, training director Weng Paraan and the hardworking PCIJ staff have enabled us to gather here for important conversations about the challenges ahead in covering elections, the West PHL Sea, and peace building, among other critical themes. But we shall also tackle our changing role, no longer as gatekeepers in a world where gates no longer exist.
Yet the world still needs truth and truth seekers.
Journalists must now be more like eagle-eyed guides with flashlights in a dark cave, seeking out and illuminating what’s true and important in a place dense with falsehood and trivia.
If we do our jobs well enough, that role could evolve into north stars, essential again for helping navigate society’s way forward.
Daghang salamat at mabuhay tayong lahat.