This is, in my professional opinion, one of the best statements ever written about the victims of extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances.

Ano ang tawag natin sa kanila?

Ang isang anak na nawalan ng magulang ay tinatawag na ulila.

Balo o biyudo naman ang tawag sa isang lalaking nawalan ng asawa.

Pero ang isang inang nawalan ng isang anak, ano ang tawag natin sa kanila? Walang tawag sa kanila.

Wala kasing salitang makapaglalarawan sa sakit na nararamdaman ng isang inang nagdadalamhati sa pagkawala ng kanyang anak. Lalong walang salita at katagang maaaring maglarawan sa isang inang patuloy na umaasa na sana’y makabalik nang ligtas ang anak niyang dinukot at naglaho na lamang na parang bula.

Paano mo nga ba papayapain ang loob niya? Anong angkop na salita ang makapagpapalubag sa naninikip niyang dibdib? Paano niya ipapanatag ang isip niya kung hindi man niya batid kung magpapadasal na ba siya o magtitirik na ng kandila o patuloy pa rin siyang aasa na isang gabi’y kakatok na lamang ang anak niya na parang walang anumang nangyari.

Sasapit na naman ang gabi, wala pa ring kumakatok…

Maghihintay siya sa gitna ng pagluha.

Magbabakasakaling buhay pa ang anak niya.

Free Jonas Burgos Movement

The statement is not just short, it is direct to the point. It is also written in Filipino which makes the readers easily relate to the emotions being conveyed by the writer.

Jonas Burgos has been missing since April 28, 2007. The son of the late publisher Jose Burgos, he is (notice that I don’t refer to him in the past tense) an agriculture graduate of the Benguet State University (BSU). After conducting a training on organic farming for a peasant group in San Miguel, Bulacan, it was reported that “a group of four to eight armed men abducted Burgos from the Ever Gotesco Mall and took him to a waiting red Toyota Revo minivan. The abduction reportedly took place between 1:15 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.”

He is among the almost 200 Filipinos who are victims of forced disappearances since Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo became president in 2001.

Arao, D. A. (2007, May 30-June 5). Halalan bilang larawan ng kabulukan. Pinoy Weekly, 6 (20), p. 5. This may be retrieved from http://www.pinoyweekly.org/pw6-20/op_ed/ed-6_20_3.htm.

This is my fourth consecutive article on the 2007 elections and the sixth since the start of the year.

I think I will still be writing about the elections in the next few weeks. At the rate the Commission on Elections‘ (Comelec) count is going, it will still take a long time before the winners in the senatorial, party-list and local elections are proclaimed. Since the start of the senatorial campaign in February, I have made it a habit to more constantly monitor the news.

The downside to writing about unfolding events is the tendency of data being rendered stale. One’s analysis - essentially based on the given facts at that particular time - could also become off-tangent (or worse, invalid!) as new developments happen. Print journalists, including columnists like me, could end up with eggs on their faces if they are not careful about the analyses they make in their outputs.

Hope you will have time to read this article to appreciate the difficulty of analyzing events as they happen.

Arao, D. A. (2007, May 23-29). Protesta ng balota. Pinoy Weekly, 6 (19), p. 5. This may be retrieved from http://www.pinoyweekly.org/pw6-19/op_ed/ed-6_19_3.htm.

This article is obviously a product of my monitoring of the latest developments in the recent senatorial and local elections. I don’t mean to preempt the actual results, but there are strong indications of the ballot being used by the electorate as an instrument of protest.

Clearly, the so-called administration machinery failed to deliver the necessary votes for the senatorial candidates under Team Unity. A 12-0 sweep is not bound to happen, unless of course the powers-that-be resorts to massive cheating.

If you’re closely monitoring election-related developments, this article might interest you.

Thanks to Sun Star Manila for including in its Friday (May 18) edition the article titled “UP professor joins Dokyu as critic.” Yes, it’s all about me.

The Philippine Entertainment Portal (PEP), on the other hand, mentioned me as one of the three critics of the show, together with broadcast journalists Kara Magsanoc-Alikpala and Ed Lingao. Please read its May 16 article titled “Patricia Evangelists hosts ABC-5 show Dokyu.”

Now it can be told as television station ABC has already issued a press release today about it.

I am one of the three members of the Board of Critics for the sixth season of Dokyu: Ang Bagong Mata ng Pinoy Documentaries. The first episode airs this Friday (May 18), 10 p.m. on ABC.

Below is an excerpt of ABC’s press release:

Prof. Danilo Araña Arao will be one of the three distinguished
critics when “Dokyu: Ang Bagong Mata ng Pinoy Documentaries” returns
on ABC 5 starting May 18, Friday, 10 p.m. ”Dokyu” will now be a
competition program, in different levels or categories. For the
first season it will be a student documentary competition.

Prof. Arao will preview all “Dokyu” finalists and judge them based
on the criteria formulated by the “Dokyu” circle.  Winners will be
determined by way of 50 percent text voting/ranking and 50 percent
critics’ rating.  Each episode will include a critic’s review of the
featured documentaries to guide viewers in evaluating the work.

“Dokyu” has been highly acclaimed for providing incentives as well
as an exhibition platform for independent documentary filmmakers,
both professionals and amateurs/students. “Dokyu” has been
recognized by award-giving bodies including the Kapisanan ng mga
Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) and the Catholic Mass Media Awards
(CMMA).

We started taping last May 1. Since it was a holiday, the crew of Dokyu (which includes, by the way, a faculty member of the UP Film Institute and a former editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian) went to our house in Marikina City instead of my office at UP CMC.

This means that you can get a glimpse of our living room, particularly the house plants we just bought. If only for this, I hope that you’ll watch the show. Thanks!

Arao, D. A. (2007, May 16-22). Blogging bilang pagtutol at `pagkilos’. Pinoy Weekly, 6 (18), p. 5. This may be retrieved from http://www.pinoyweekly.org/pw6-18/op_ed/ed-6_18_3.htm.

Perhaps this is an article that has the most number of italicized words so far. It’s hard enough to write about technology as you need to have both textbook knowledge and actual experience.

What makes the task more daunting is when you have to write in Filipino. It’s often hard to avoid the use of English jargon, as they have no direct Filipino translation.

For example, do you know the Filipino translation of HTML and WYSIWYG? What about “software program” and “operating system”?

Does this mean that we are better off writing in English than in Filipino, at least when it comes to technology? Of course not. We must keep in mind that the choice of language depends on one’s intended audience. It’s just that when writing about technology in Filipino, you should be open to using jargon, mostly in English. In addition, you should make a conscious effort to explain these jargon in words that the intended audience can understand.

In any case, I’ve wanted to write about HTML hand coding and blogging for quite some time and it was only after I heard about the cyber-fever campaign of the Kabataan Party that I finally got around to doing so. As I analyzed the use of blogging for political ends, I also promoted the use of hand coding in designing websites.

Dependence on WYSIWYG software programs, in the final analysis, not only benefits transnational corporations in the long run. It also makes future webmasters lose sight of the principles of design and layout, focusing more on maximizing the software programs they are exposed to. In the process, they end up creating, developing and maintaining websites that could end up alienating their target audience.

I hope that you would find time to read this article. Thanks for your attention.

If you’re 18 years old or over, this is one dirty finger you should proudly display at least once every three years.

Just how indelible is the Commission on Elections‘ (Comelec) ink? It only took soap, water and a soft brush to clean my “dirty” finger.

Comelec should consider itself lucky that I did not vote again.

(Updated May 25, 2007) : For some strange reason, the indelible ink on my right finger came back and I haven’t got around to removing it as of this writing. Check out the picture below.

N.B. - I attended the launch of our book Oligarchic Politics: Elections and the Party-List System in the Philippines last May 8 (Tuesday) where the authors were asked to present the highlights of the chapter or chapters they wrote. Here’s mine.

I promise that mine will be the shortest presentation today. Journalists, after all, like it short and sweet. (And I’d like to think that while I may not be short, at least I’m sweet!)

The chapter I wrote is titled “Elections, Personality Politics and the Mass Media.” I will not bore you with empirical and anecdotal data that you may all be familiar with already. Allow me to just present some of my major arguments.

During elections, candidates normally engage in politicking instead of politicizing. The former is characterized by, among others, muckraking and one-liners to questions that demand honest answers, while the latter seeks to enlighten the electorate on the burning issues of the day.

Mass media are often blamed for perpetuating the kind of elections and campaigns that go with them. Journalists, however, are wont to say that they only report what happens, and that what is needed is political maturity on the part of both the electorate and the candidates so that political campaigns can be taken to a higher level of discussion of issues.

The candidates and their handlers can conveniently argue that they are merely giving in to the demands of the electorate to make the campaigns as light (read: entertaining) as possible. However, the candidates cannot deny their responsibility in failing to take the campaigns to a higher level of discussion of issues. In fact, the fundamental definition of issues becomes problematic as they become fixated on answering and hurdling character attacks like citizenship and disqualification cases and consequently consider them as important issues.

While it is the journalists’ duty to report what happens on the road and they could be constrained by the refusal of candidates to comprehensively discuss burning issues of the day, they should expose such candidates who fail to articulate their stand on issues. Something can be done by the mass media organizations to ensure a comprehensive discussion of issues concerning politics, economics and culture and consequently transcend personality politics that characterizes campaigns during elections. Journalists should therefore keep in mind their primary duty of providing information that people need (not what they want) as they go about covering the 2007 national and local elections.

Marami pong salamat at isang mapagpalayang araw sa inyong lahat.

Arao, D. A. (2007, May 9-15). Eleksiyon at ang higit sa “karaniwang politiko”. Pinoy Weekly, 6 (17), p. 5. This may be retrieved from http://www.pinoyweekly.org/pw6-17/op_ed/ed-6_17_3.htm.

I wrote and filed this article last Sunday (May 6), exactly four days before the Social Weather Stations (SWS) and Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) released their May 2-4 survey on the senatorial election.

The “four or five” candidates I might vote for (whose names I did not identify in my article) landed in the PDI-SWS survey’s top 12. Care to guess who they are?

I initially planned to make a public endorsement of 12 senatorial candidates, but I sincerely doubt if, from now until May 14, I can choose 12 from among the senatorial candidates, some of whom I personally know in various circumstances.

Consequently, I opted to write about the need to be level-headed in choosing one’s candidates. We have to be open to the possibility that they will be working against the people’s interest at some point in the future, hence the probable “awkward” situation of us denouncing the ones we used to support.

Please read my article since I provided, for all its worth, a working framework in choosing one’s candidates. We only have one vote, after all, so we have to make it count.

Of course, there is no guarantee in this day and age that our votes will be counted at all. Then again, that’s for another article, right?

The Kabataan News Network (KNN) interviewed me on October 27, 2006 (Friday) on the issue of campus journalism.

I remember that day well because the KNN people arrived when the crew of Net 25 was leaving after an interview on the situation of tabloids and broadsheets in the Philippines.

It’s very seldom that I grant consecutive television interviews less than 30 minutes in between. We all know how cruel television can be to one’s physical appearance, so there is a need to always stay fresh and alert for every interview. When you’re in front of the camera, you can’t afford to look tired or harassed even if you are.

Why am I writing about an event that happened more than six months ago? I got an unexpected text message from a reporter of KNN at around 6:30 a.m. last May 5 (Saturday) that my interview would be finally aired on Kabataan X-press at 7:00 a.m. on ABS-CBN.

Joy and I were supposed to leave the house by that time but we decided to check out Kabataan X-press. The report on campus journalism focused on the plight of three campus journalists from the University of the Philippines in Los Baños (UPLB), Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) and Bulacan State University (BulSU). The three students experienced different forms of harassment and intimidation from their school administrators. I was interviewed to analyze what they were going through and to relate their experience as student-journalists to the practice of journalism in general.

While I have no complaints about how my interview was edited for brevity, I noticed that there were certain angles of me where I appeared to be harassed. To make things worse, I forgot THE self-imposed rule when facing the camera: SMILE MORE OFTEN!

After the show, I quickly sent text messages to Atom Araullo, the host of KNN, and Angelo Supe, the reporter who interviewed me, to request a video capture of my interview for posting on this blog.

I have yet to receive a vidcap, and I would understand if KNN opts not to grant my request. Can you imagine me not smiling and looking harassed? Did I hear someone say, “All the time”?

Update (May 10, 1:38 pm): KNN has just sent me via email the vidcap I requested. Check it out.

So tired and unsmiling I am! Anyway, let’s see how eagle-eyed you are. Joy is seen three-and-a half times (huh?) in this picture. One is obvious, the other two-and-a-half not so.

To paraphrase that famous Carmen Sandiego computer game, “Where in My Office is Joy Arao?” Any players?