(This is the second of our four-part series on the speech delivered by Chief Justice Reynato Puno last Nov. 15 at the Oxford Hotel, Clark Field, Pampanga during the 33rd KBP Top-Level Management Conference. Chief Justice Puno was here last Saturday.)

So, if we need to know about these places and issues, and if these are outside the scope of our personal experience, how do we find out about them? The answer is through the media. Radio, newspapers and television carry information to us about events that we do not witness personally and that happen in places to which we have no access. Through this they make us indirect witnesses of the events of the world. In this way, the role of the mass media in contemporary society is that of information delivery.

In this capacity they bring us two types of information. The first is about events outside our own society. This is the sense in which Marshall McLuhan claimed that the media made the world into a "global village." We are now familiar with a range of countries, and of issues and the lives of the people in these countries, that previous generations were not. The time taken for information to reach us has also been significantly reduced. It took three weeks for the details of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 to reach London (Knightley, 1975). Nowadays it would be live on our television screens.

The other type of information they bring us is about our own society. There are many places where socially significant events occur and in which important issues arise, are debated and are resolved. For the most part we do not have easy and routine access to them. These include social and political institutions such as Parliament, the law courts, and the boardrooms of powerful corporations, and also geographic locations such as urban ghettos and rural farmyards. The media increase the visibility of these institutions and locations through the coverage that they give to what happens in them. (Media Power, A Sociological Introduction, pp. 13-15)

This is the historical function of media in a free society; it is also their continuing challenge. By no means is this an easy, problem-free burden. Truth to tell, in the battle between truth and falsehood, which is critical to the war between democracy and totalitarianism, it is the members of the media who have incurred the greatest number of casualties. The tragedy is that, oftentimes, they die in silence - unsung and unwept.

Let me quote the preface written by Anderson Cooper in the book entitled "Attacks on the Press in 2006," which accurately chronicles assaults on media practitioners all over the world including the Philippines, viz: Silence. When a journalist is killed, more often than not, there is silence.

In Russia, someone followed Anna Politkovskaya home and quietly shot her to death in her apartment building. The killer muffled the sound of the gun with a silencer. Her murder made headlines around the world in October, but from the Kremlin there was nothing. No statement. No condolence. Silence. When Vladimir Putin was finally asked by reporters about the murder of one of his nation's most prominent investigative journalists, he said Politkovskaya's influence in Russia was "insignificant." Anna Politkovskaya was anything but insignificant. Her reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya had upset many powerful people. Threats against her life were nothing new.

She was an award-winning writer for Novaya Gazeta and had been named by Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as one of the most prominent defenders of press freedom in its 25-year history. She deserved more than silence.

According to CPJ, Politkovskaya was the 13th journalist killed in Russia in a gang-land-style hit since Putin became president in 2000. Guess how many of the people responsible have been brought to justice? None. As CPJ documents in this important book, all too often, attacks on journalists go unsolved. Authorities either refuse to investigate, or refuse to acknowledge the possible link to the reporter's work. (To be continued next Wednesday)
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