Media in Focus on the Malu Fernandez Issue

In my last post about Malu Fernandez, I was looking for something concrete, a harsher punishment by the media community to throw at Malu for being irresponsible in her writing. Her resignation isn’t comforting for me; it’s just not enough. Having her sacked isn’t enough consolation for the people she’s hurt; the OFWs and all of us proud pinoys. When I read her article, I could not help but feel as if she’s ashamed to be Pinoy and that she’s afraid to be with her countrymen. That rich and poor complex in the country has got to stop. That ridiculous division should not put one above the rest and definitely, it should not make the others less of a human being.

These are the Media in Focus clips I’ve found in Pedestrian Observer.

Part I.

 

Part II.

Part III.

Part IV.

Part V.

Part VI.

To be honest, I didn’t like the way Cheche Lazaro handled her show. It was so obvious that she sided with Malu. Being the host, she should have been unbiased but clearly, she wanted to make sure that Malu was the victim and that her writing was taken too much by the offended parties. Lorraine Belmonte was cautious, too cautious in fact because she didn’t want to show her partiality towards Malu. Fine, both of these women are rich so I guess Belmonte found the article funny and witty. Ricky Carandang was great, even my dad loved him to bits. Carandang pointed out that no one is the victim because both parties have fought back.

The thing with Media in Focus is that the original issue, the root cause of all this controversy, was drowned somewhere when Lazaro seemingly sided with Malu. I might be the only one who thinks this of Lazaro, but throughout the whole show, I got the feeling that she blamed the bloggers, the internet community, of too much lynching and violence towards Fernandez. In the first place, the bloggers, the OFWs and all the people who reacted, would not have reacted if Malu was sensitive in her ‘wits and words’ towards the OFWs. It was her who started all of this so she got was she deserved. People were mad at her for offending them, what would you expect? Besides, being called names (e.g. baboy, mahadera, demonyita etc.) is part of our culture. Ganyan tayo mag-asaran di ba? Childish, yes, but we do that. Besides, when Malu said she’d take full responsibility for her writing, that means that she has to take the full angst of the people. So really, why is she complaining now? She should have known better, edited and toned down her article first before having it published.

With all of this said, I feel sad that Media in Focus failed to capture the essence of this controversy. I feel bad that bloggers and the blogging community have been labeled as going too far or ‘lynching’ Malu. And lastly, I feel discontented that the show didn’t show much of the OFW side and why are they truly angry. I just hope that in their future segments, they’ll dig deeper and be more open minded to issues. I hope that the show’s researchers would do a lot better next time.