Aquino Hopes to Set Up ‘People’s Media’ TV Free of Any Censorship

The administration of President Corazon Aquino, acknowledging that it has not been able to determine who owns the Philippines’ private television stations, said Friday that it wants to establish “people’s media” outlets under government control.

“The people’s media will be run by a broadcasting authority which will be responsible to me,” Teodoro Locsin Jr., the new minister of information, announced. He added, however, that its editorial independence “will be protected by statute.”

Locsin said he will look into the possibility of modeling the authority on the British Broadcasting Corp.

The government’s television policy was included in a statement Locsin made on the administration’s news and information policies, which he said are aimed at dismantling “the government propaganda machine” set up under President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

No Monopoly Control

“This means not only protecting editorial freedom for our newspapers, TV and radio but also ensuring that never can a small group of crony businessmen build up a monopoly control over the media,” Locsin said.

Locsin, 37, who was educated at Stanford University, is the son of a publisher whose newspaper in Manila was closed down by Marcos in 1972.

There are five television stations in the Philippines, one owned by the government. The other four are private but are controlled by friends and associates of Marcos. The deposed president’s daughter, Imee Marcos Manotoc, is commonly believed to be the hidden owner of all but one of these stations, but Locsin said the new government has not established who the owners are.

Issue of Media Access

In the course of the three-day crisis that forced Marcos to flee the country on Feb. 25, defecting troops seized the government TV station, Channel 4, and managed to cut Marcos off in mid-sentence as he addressed the nation. Later, Marcos switched to one of the private TV stations, but its transmitter also was knocked out.

In the days after the government station was seized, its programing was so favorable to Aquino that some groups complained of difficulty in getting their messages on the air.

A Manila official of the left-wing Nationalist Alliance for Justice, Freedom and Democracy recently told fellow members of the group, “One thing the left has to understand is that you can’t depend on the liberals for access to the media. You have to seize your own station.”

Locsin insisted that the government-owned station is open to all political views. If a leader of Marcos’ party wants to go on the air, he said, he is entitled to do so.

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“There will be no censorship,” he said, noting that Marcos’ government had no legal authority to censor newspapers. “What they had was a telephone,” Locsin said. “They would place a call to an editor to tell him what news to play up and what to play down--with a threat that the military would follow.”

Locsin said the Aquino government’s approach to the broadcast media will be somewhat different. It is not enough simply to protect the freedom of privately owned stations, he said, and added: “After all, only one of our TV stations was actually owned by the government. Yet the other channels, which were nominally privately owned, played the same government propaganda.”

He said the Aquino government will try to ensure that there are no hidden owners of private TV stations, and that ownership is “as broadly based as possible.” In addition, he said, “there must be TV and radio stations owned by the people competing side-by-side with privately owned stations.”

Derides ‘New Order’

Earlier in the week, in an interview with the Manila newspaper Business Day, Locsin derided a move by some Asian and African governments to establish a “new information order” in an effort to counteract what these governments perceive to be a pro-Western bias.

Locsin said he refuses to accept the assumption that there is “a colored man’s way of looking at and handling the truth and a white man’s way of doing the same thing.”

“There is only one kind of truth,” he said, “and that is objective fact, and all that a journalist should do is report the truth and in an interesting fashion.”

Congressman Speaks

On Friday morning, Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), chairman Of a House subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs, said in a speech at the University of the Philippines School of Law that the United States “should do everything possible to help the Philippine government recover the resources the Marcoses and their cronies have brought to the United States.”

Solarz was applauded when he proposed an increase in aid to the Philippines and the new government, but there were derisive jeers when he added, “I don’t think there will be any strings attached.”

As he left the campus, Solarz was picketed by several dozen students protesting the presence of U.S. military bases in the Philippines. A placard carried by one of the students urged, “Meddlers go home.”