How sad it is to know that some of the world’s economies chug along to the path of recovery no matter how efficiently tested those financial strategies were? Because when politics gets in the way of progress, everything else is forsaken. And what is shocking is when these politicians, who are there to uphold the law and serve their constituents in good stead, are the ones making it doubly difficult for the country concerned because of their own selfish motives.
For many years, developing economies are at the forefront of this debate. Surely, politicians are always starring on the front pages of the newspapers. And they feel good to be featured making some negative or positive comments about something that they think get in their way. Traditionally, this has been the practice in the political arena for many decades now.
And the institution to blame is the media entities themselves whose news gatherers are always on the lookout for newsworthy subjects of great interest to the public and for corporate profits at the same time. As always, public interests are stirred to the extent that they sometimes turn out to unproductive to the populace where they are supposed to serve.
Just look at the chaos in Gaza Strip, the killings in Kenya, the political standoff in Myanmar, and the military discontent in the Philippines, are all products of misguided political and media practices. For politicians, the people’s sufferings could be the outcome of their wanton disregard for accepted constitutional norms that they are supposed to uphold because their attention are always to protect, if not to build, their political image at the expense of the people’s sufferings. And during elections, they are reportedly known to dip their hands in taxpayers’ money to buy votes to assure their political victories. This is the reason why they want to stay for long in office, even if other candidates are better qualified and more honest than those currently sitting at the helm. Isn’t this greed? Or what do you call it? Gone are the days when prestige and dignity are well preserved to stay away from public scrutiny. It’s not true these days because of personal interests are at stake. To further protect their interests, older politicians have to groom their younger siblings to follow in their footsteps, which becomes a cycle of political dynasty.
Likewise, the media are to blame for these political and economic troubles. In jounalism, there are two kinds of news: one is negative and the other is positive. Nowadays, big media organizations are hell bent more on getting the negative side of the news because they tend to sell more in the market. Captive readers and listeners are always on the take for news items that ring differently to the ears, rather those positive ones which all the more targeted for development purposes. The latter is more practiced in countries where freedom of the press is curtailed like in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and other governments where officials believed that freedom of expression destroys their programs of governance. In the Philippines, journalists who tend to expose corruption in government are exposed to all sort of retaliations even from top government officials.
Sometimes, the penalty for exposing multi-billion rackets by journalists is death. Activists who drum beat support for their causes are also threatened in the same magnitude of danger, always stalking them in sleep because some military intelligence agents are allegedly on the loose to eliminate them. And the United Nations is keeping these records based on its recent investigations and observation tours in the country. And the military wasn’t happy about the outcome of the U.N. probe.
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