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Editorial: Greeneland
revisited
IF there were a Madonna filling in as patron saint for
journalists, chances are she would be blessing and taunting the confused
members of the press peopling Graham Greene’s novels.
Greene, an Oxford don who became a newspaper editor, wrote novels
examining how grand movements—the religious persecution in Mexico, the
civil strife in Vietnam, South Africa and Havana—affected the lives of
ordinary people caught in the maelstrom.
Clinging at the periphery of this political and personal turbulence was
the quintessential Greene journalist: someone whose insistence on
impartiality and disengagement approached the obsessional. However, the
journalist-character’s decisions and actions invariably had the opposite
effect of sinking the Fourth Estate inextricably deeper into, what Greene
called, “the heart of the matter.”
Misstep
Greene, who converted into Catholicism late in life, is familiar with
agnostics and their tortured wandering into territories that tested all
beliefs, including the insistence that nothing was worthy of belief.
In his 1955 novel “The Quiet American,” the narrator, a seasoned foreign
correspondent, mocks a minor American official channeling aid to a rebel
group in the Franco-Vietminh war. After witnessing how the American’s
interventions result in more bloodshed, the reporter comments on the
terrifying nature of “innocence at large: “I never knew a man who had
better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
Cynicism, not blood, courses in the veins of Greene’s journalist-narrator
who spares no one, not even himself: “I was a man without a vocation—one
cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation.”
To some extent, this self-mockery is justified. Greene respects the
reporter covering the field but is scathing about the writer shaping
opinions: “a superior sort of journalist. (who) gets hold of an idea and
then alters every situation to fit the idea.”
Engaged
For all the posturing his journalist-characters make, Greene is a press
ally under deep cover. He bares the brittleness of judgment that values as
“news,” for instance, the death of women and infants in a parade bombing,
but not that of soldiers. Greene contends that this selective perception
and dissemination of filtered views is anathema to the journalistic
dilemma of covering the truth while engaged in a gray duty “to do good,
not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.”
Contrary then to the idea that a journalist is detached from and thus
superior to the coverage, the press “belongs” to its milieu. This
belongingness is less the condition of a performer who wanders into the
stage when it is not yet his cue. It is more of the quandary of a letter
or even a punctuation that, in the context of a sentence, is altered by
and alters the meaning in that string of symbols.
Continuing past
Following a tradition started in September 1994, the local press leads the
community in observing Cebu Press Freedom Week.
This celebration remains to be the only one of its type in the whole
country. First organized by the Cebu Council of Media Leaders (CCML), the
week seeks to “remind the public and the press itself that the precious
freedom it now enjoys must be protected from any and all threats.”
In 1998, the Cebu working media agreed to time the observance with Sept.
21 as it was during Martial Law that the most flagrant violations of the
press were carried out.
Although 2004 is not 1972, the year foists self-contemplation even on a
profession notoriously addicted to deadlines and changes. Among the things
a post-9/11 world woke up to is that there are no “post” scenarios. There
is only a continuum: if journalists disappeared in 1972, they are still
murdered in 2004. If 1972 muzzled the freedom of speech, today’s readers
and news sources are asserting their right to reply.
By many indicators, the Cebu media today bears striking resemblance to
Greeneland. Cebu Press Freedom Week is then a timely sabbatical to reflect
on journalism’s curse-blessing: “You (referring to the journalist) must
wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. You’re engaged, like the rest
of us.”
The Graham Greene
Birthplace Trust's annual festival is held around 2nd October (Graham
Greene's birthday). Visit
www.grahamgreenebt.org for details. |