(no subject)
At the office we are constantly eating. Packages of food - noodles, cakes, nuts, arrive every day. Ed tells me that he used to send food to the lifestyle section until his friends there told him to stop because they already get so much. It's supposedly so the people sending the food will get favourable writeups, but half the time they don't even remember who sent it. Ed has a story of an infamous editor who didn't used to share the gifts sent to her with the rest of the staff and was gossiped about and reviled throughout the newspaper and the PR industry. Eyes wide with horror he talks of how she even left food to rot in the ref (fridge) instead of giving it to the staff. He is mortified at this waste of food. “ If you get something, you share it” he says. He himself is punctilious about not wasting food despite being able to afford it, and I watch his careful shopping and supervision of food in the house with admiration. He explains to me how he buys mangoes in varying stages of ripeness so that they can be eaten over the week, each as it reaches perfect firmness and I see him worrying over the bananas if they appear to be getting overripe. The answer, which at home would be banana cake or smoothie, here is boiling the bananas in their skins so the take on a soft sweet dessert like flavour. Alternatively they can be wrapped in wanton skins and deep fried or simply sliced and fried. You can buy them like this on sticks, hot off the BBQ from street vendors.
When I think of the amount of food which gets thrown out at home I am mortified myself.
Ed says that he makes sure to remember to send stuff to the people who work in the lifestyle office and don't get to go out and receive all the perks of arts reporters going to swanky openings and product launches. He says remembering and respecting the little people is really important in PR, you can't just talk to the editors, you have to chat with everyone. Otherwise the people on the desk can easily “lose” your photos, not give your story the attention it deserves, swear black and blue that there is only a tiny space left on the page to fit it in, “they can be very hard headed”.
In some ways these secret acts of revenge delight me. Like the waiter spitting in the food, or even more effective, simply “forgetting” to go back and serve a table of rude customers, these small subversions are incredibly satisfying and go a little way in redressing the power balances of the world. I remember when I started talking about going into journalism, aside from ecstasies over hearing me use the word career, some people seemed surprised and wondered, with good cause, if that was what I really wanted. A friend asked what I would do if someone was mean to me during an interview. I replied that I'd probably cry and then change their middle name to arse when I wrote the article. I was joking, but it is still a sweetly seductive thought. Despite claims to a Godlike objectivity, journalists are still human and at the end of the day calling someone an arse may be the most honest thing anyone has ever written about them. Which is why I guess blogs were invented and I will be the first to admit that the rabid name-calling rants which some of them descend into is the antithesis of good journalism. But then again through subtle use of hegemony, binary opposition and key words which have an implied if not stated negative connotation, articles can be hugely damaging to a person or movement, particularly if they are in a minority, without ever actually saying anything bad about them. See the Kupu Taea study on reporting of Treaty of Waitangi issues if you need proof of this.
So back to the newspaper office and the free food. There is a culture of gift giving. The way Ed describes it, it seems mere politeness which helps the world to run smoothly on well oiled tracks. It's letting others share in your good fortune, the simple mechanics of one good turn deserves another, but looking at it a different way it is merely an extension of the corruption which mars Filipino society at every level and has resulted in the loss of literally billions of dollars which could have gone into public works but instead have been privately pocketed.
So if there is this culture of gift giving in the Philippines, relatively benign at the lower level but damaging to the country at the scale of politicians, how do you separate out the two, how do you even begin to understand it from a non-western viewpoint, where it may come from a tradition earlier, and outside of the democracy it sits so uneasily along side. How, when the very journalists who are most strident in their outrage against bribery and corruption, can be seen sitting round the office eating gifted cakes, do you begin to change this situation? Or am I making ridiculous leaps in conflating the two? Maybe the difference is that the gifts sent to the newspaper here are shared among everybody instead of being kept in the hands of a wealthy owner?
At the risk of sounding like a rude ignorant foreigner who is in no position to judge another country, I ask some of the journalists around me what their opinion is. One tells me that as a rule of thumb, if you feel uncomfortable then you shouldn't accept a gift, if it's something you couldn't afford yourself, then it's inappropriate, but food is harmless and doesn't effect the way anything is written or editorialised.
I don't think most of the journalists and subs know who the food comes from but I still wonder if subconsciously those higher up in the newspapers feel better disposed to people and organisations who have been generous to them.
Another editor tells me that they have “a different concept of hospitality”, that giving food is part of Filipino culture - “a gesture of gratitude”. I can well believe her as practically everyone I meet tries to press food upon me in this snack obsessed country. A broadcaster I meet tells me the tagline of the midday news is “The Freshest News at Lunchtime” - “because everything in the Philippines is associated with eating.” I've also been proudly told of the Filipino habit of discussing what they are going to eat at the next meal while still eating the first one.
The editor tells me that no demand to print stories, comes with the food and they just accept it whoever it comes from.
In my limited experience of newspapers in Aotearoa, I can recall the Cadbury Chocolate Factory occasionally slipping a box of chocolates to the Otago Daily Times who are just around the corner or the science festival sending a thankyou note to me and the other intern for our coverage. These are reflections of the fact that they are all part of the same small community and I don't imagine it would stop the ODT from running negative stories.
The editor does tell me that corruption is a problem in the Philippine media (like almost any organisation you care to name in the Philippines), but food is not part of the equation. She says politicians or corporations use PR people to get their stories across. They will get in touch with certain journalists and then “money changes hands”, and the journalists write the stories they tell them to. There are various terms for this type of journalism such as "envelopmental journalism" as in envelope mental. where you wait to receive the envelope of money after the story is published or broadcast. Former President Fidel Ramos liked to call it ACDC journalists - attack and collect (the $$$) defend and collect. However at her newspaper she says it is virtually impossible to slip in one of these false stories because the news goes through so many gate keepers and it is pretty obvious to the editors if a report isn't true. She says the editors can usually detect if money is involved in a story, especially if it is very different from what the other newspapers are running, and they simply change it at the desk. Reporters generally seem to have no control over how their stories are editorialised and as the newspapers tend to have a reporter stationed at each major government department or press conference, the final copy which is printed in the paper can have many different stories combined into one. I've seen up to eight names contributing to the byline. On big stories it can be a truly collaborative process.
When I ask the editor if she thinks there might be any connection between the polite giving of food and the loaded giving of money. She, who as editor is facing 21 libel suits, but “they never win, I know my libel laws”, answers thoughtfully yet acerbically: “Maybe the giving culture travels over into the politician's minds and they think they should be giving away money - except its not their money to give, it belongs to the taxpayers.”
