I didn’t have the inkling that it could be triggered by a phone patch by the ABS-CBN News Channel or ANC. After the interview, a barrage of phone calls from different media outfits came successively: two national TV networks, one major radio station, one Japanese newspaper, one international newspaper, and two international independent news networks. 

The interviews started Tuesday morning and ended in the evening. I had to break my meetings every now and then and attended to interviews by journalists and phone patch interviews from other countries. It’s kind of weird talking serious matters during meeting while handling a phone answering questions about the massacre from somebody in the Wall Street based in Bangkok and the Aljazeera in Kuala Lumpur. 

And it even gets weirder to be talking through the phone with Karen Davila at DZMM live as she threw cut-throat questions while I bravely pretended answering them through a combination of classical Tagalog or Taglish as if my answers are gospel truth when they are in fact mere “hunches” of the moment. 

All these happened as if I was fully informed of the massacre; truth was my data were nil.

What I simply had was a general familiarity of Mindanao issue; and my view relative to clan politics in Mindanao was based on my modest framework on “Moro political dynasty,” a small chapter I wrote in the “The Moro Reader” published last year. 

To think that I do not even teach any course about Mindanao, though I often write about it; what I generally teach are what I call “hard” Islamic Studies like “Islamic Philosophy,” “Qur’anic Exegesis,” “Arab Historiography” and others. And I have never even handled “soft” Islamic Studies subjects like “Muslims in the Philippines” and so on. 

Indeed, in our time today, specialization is passé. General knowledge is in. And the ability to gel them together is a necessity. 

When I initially turned down the ANC’s invitation as I felt quite jaded in appearing as a guest analyst at the ABS-CBN Studio, I thought I’d be able to evade the media.

Not only it’s tiring going to the studio to sit with an anchor who asks one or two questions wherein even before one’s seat gets hot the interview is over already. It’s more than that. Evasion is a safest recourse not to babble on an issue without having the basic facts. 

But the staff of the ANC persisted that phone patch would just be fine. Even before I could mumble another reason to evade as I’d yet to read the news about the massacre, I was already interviewed in TV live thru phone. 

There are times when analysts felt that less must already be said on things or on problems happening around as they have not changed for a long time or they have simply kept in recurring every now and then. Instead, efforts to solve them must be given more time and priority. 

And simply turning off one’s mobile phone is analysts’ poor way in avoiding the media as they could always call their residence or office anyway. Where analysts have some proscription against lying, they couldn’t simply recourse to such tell-them-I-am-out cliché. They have to face the crucible to engage the media. 

I was at the National Library in Manila the whole day when the “Maguindanao” massacre took place. I was literally closed from the world let alone aware of such gruesome news. When I arrived home late on Monday night, the Aljazeera had already called up requesting for an interview of the news I didn’t even know about.

Keeping pace with fast flow of information and deciphering important issues is a burden faced by any analysts. It’s is like sifting through pebbles in the white beach of Sulu. 

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks; they provide helpful information right into our personal e-files where news and other matters of shared interest are easily made available. 

But as one could not glue himself on the internet all the time, it’s just impossible to follow on news and headlines. 

In a situation where media is persistent to get my view about an issue or event that just happens or about to happen, my technique is to get the news or the message from the messenger itself by reversing our roles for a moment by throwing few comments and questions to sort of break the ice with the aim to get basic facts before I weave through my thought and make a sense of them. 

Quite nonchalantly, many people consider such process as “analysis.” Indeed, there’s nothing grand there; it’s simply “smart talk” – whatever it means.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Julkipli Wadi is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

---

Share this story through the following Social Media sites: