Not too long ago, free and competitive elections and a press that can report freely were unknown in most of Southeast Asia. Today, Thais, Filipinos and Indonesians enthusiastically take part in 'real' elections.

In many ways, these elections are still flawed exercises, but they are far from the rituals of manufactured consent that took place in the authoritarian era and that are still taking place in the not-yet-liberated countries of Southeast Asia.

Today, in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, citizens are 'enjoying' - although this may not be the right word - press freedom.

By now, however, Thais, Filipinos and Indonesians have also realised that that freedom, which they once wished and so ardently fought for, is a complicated thing. It is a double-edged sword, a gift but also a curse. It is something that is so precious but also so easily frittered away.

This is the wrong thing to say to a room full of press freedom advocates. It may also be an insensitive thing to say in the light of the persecution of writers and journalists in countries like Burma. But I will say it anyway: Fighting for freedom is a relatively simple thing. The difficult part is figuring out what to do with it once you have it, how to use it wisely and responsibly, and also - I am sure my Thai colleagues will agree with me - how to keep it safe from demagogues disguised as democrats, from democratically elected leaders who have little appreciation of the role of the press as guardian and watchdog of the public interest.

Today those of us who labour in the fields of journalism in Southeast Asia's democracies have since discovered that the edifice of liberal constitutions and laws that guarantee press freedom do not suffice. This alone cannot protect us from greedy media owners who care for profit but not professionalism and public service, from corporate raiders who take over once-fiercely independent news organisations and turn watchdogs into compliant and comfortable lapdogs, and from mobs and small-town bosses who physically attack and even kill journalists for reporting in a manner they do not agree with.

Flattering photographs only

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When I started out as a journalist in 1982, just before the regime of Ferdinand Marcos started to unravel, the Philippine press was held in the tight grip of dictatorship. In the magazine where I worked, we were not allowed to print negative stories about the Marcoses, nothing about their fabulous wealth or bloody record of human rights abuses. We were not even allowed to use unflattering photographs. Marcos always had to look strong, even if by then he was already seriously ill. And Imelda, of course, always had to be beautiful. We were told that under no circumstances could we print photos showing her double chin.

It was therefore clear to us who were journalists at that time that our freedom to report was contingent upon the freedom of the rest of our country. In other words, only when there was a change of government, only when the authoritarian regime was overthrown or crumbled from its own weight would we be able to practice real journalism. For this reason, many journalists were sympathetic to, and took part in, the anti-Marcos movement. The press itself, especially the alternative press that emerged after the assassination of Benigno Aquino in 1983, played a pivotal role in the democracy movement by reporting on the abuses of the regime, by highlighting the successes of the opposition to Marcos, and by providing a voice to those who had been muzzled and restrained for so long.

In Thailand and Indonesia, which like the Philippines embarked on their own perilous journey toward democracy, the story was the same. Journalists braved the restrictions of authoritarian rule by reporting, truthfully and fearlessly, on the true state of the nation.

In Indonesia, a flurry of underground newspapers and email groups emerged as alternative sources of information in the late Suharto era. In Thailand, newspapers like The Nation and the Bangkok Post were beacons of light in the information blackout imposed during the Bloody May uprising in 1992. The 1990s were a golden age for Thai journalism, and Thai journalists should be given credit for nursing their people's aspirations for freedom and for pushing for democratic reforms even under the most adverse economic circumstances.

It is this story that binds us. Thai, Filipino and Indonesian journalists share a history of struggle against authoritarian controls. This shared bond was the seed for the formation of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (Seapa). Those of us who founded Seapa in 1998 felt that we should band together to protect the freedoms we had won and also to help those among our neighbours who were starting out on the path leading toward press freedom and democracy. We wanted to show that there was a Southeast Asian force for a free press. We wanted ours to be a distinct Southeast Asian voice, not a mere echo of the West, but our own, articulating the vision of a free, independent, and pluralistic media in Southeast Asia.

Democracy being challenged

That vision, of course, is being challenged. Until recently, Southeast Asian strongmen like Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Kwan Yew and Malaysia's former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad, were arguing that there were distinct "Asian values" that accounted for the success of Asia's so-called "tiger" economies. Asians, they argued, put a premium on consensus and obedience to authority and did not value individual liberties and freedoms as much as those in the West. The crisis that struck East Asian economies in the late 1990s took the shine out of the myth of Asian values, and showed that it was precisely the lack of freedom and information that was partly responsible for the crisis.

Today, however, the arguments for semi-authoritarian modes of governance are being recycled. There are strong authoritarian currents in Southeast Asian democracies. The emergence of Thaksin Shinawatra in what was arguably the region's most vibrant democracy, Thailand, attests to the strength of these currents. Thaksin, in fact, is emerging as a role model for similar types of political figures. Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, is a great admirer of Thaksin. And, one of Philippines' presidential candidates, Panfilo Lacson, who is also a former police general, says that Filipinos need an "iron hand" to rule them after 18 years of a messy democracy. Lacson's television commercials portray him as the direct descendant of a line of Southeast Asian leaders starting from Lee Kwan Yew and Mahathir and ending with Thaksin.

Similarly, in Indonesia, citizens weary of the feckless leadership of President Megawati Sukarnoputri are yearning for a strongman figure. The viability of democracy in Southeast Asia, therefore, is being challenged, paradoxically enough, by both weak leaders and strong ones. Corrupt and dithering democrats unable to impose the rule of law give democracy a bad name. But at the same time, strongmen who believe their word is law and who have little patience for the niceties of free speech and human rights are trampling on freedoms that have been so dearly won.

In a conference on broadcast media self-regulation organised by Seapa last year, a Thai academic from Chulalongkorn University, described the dilemma of the broadcast media in Thailand this way: Thai broadcasting, she said, is caught between the tiger and the crocodile. What she meant was that the broadcast media are straining from, the tiger of state-imposed restrictions on one hand, and on the other, the crocodile of the free market where ratings and profits rule.

The tiger and the crocodile just about sum up the dilemma of the media in Southeast Asia. State restrictions, particularly on broadcasting, remain major constraints on the freedom of journalists and on access to information by citizens. Except in the Philippines and Indonesia, Southeast Asian broadcasting remains very much under state control. In many countries, the state has a virtual monopoly of broadcast ownership and privately run broadcast agencies are still a minority. State broadcasting in all of Southeast Asia is not public service broadcasting in the model of the BBC but mainly broadcasting in the service of the state and those who rule it. State-owned broadcast networks are often mouthpieces for repressive, inept or corrupt governments.

Apart from broadcasting, state restrictions on the print media as well as on Internet access persist in countries like Burma, Laos and Vietnam, but also in places like Malaysia and Singapore that have otherwise fully embraced the latest in information technology. The evolution of knowledge societies envisioned by international organisations like Unesco therefore face real obstacles in Southeast Asia. As long as undue state restrictions on the flow of knowledge and information remain in place, large chunks of Southeast Asia will be left behind in the global rush toward the Information Age.

Unfortunately, the latest upsurge in terrorism and separatist violence in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines as well as the fears of an Islamist resurgence in Malaysia and Singapore are providing governments with new excuses to further restrict information flows.

Battling the 'crocodile'

But the state is not the only problem. We know how to wrestle with the tiger. We have won before. The free media in Southeast Asia are free precisely because journalists and citizens have fought for their freedom. The media in our countries have helped overthrow dictatorial regimes. We know how to fight repression. We have far less experience, however, in dealing with the excesses of a free market and the challenges these pose to our freedom.

We can overthrow governments, but can we overthrow markets? We were not beaten by the tiger, but can we resist being swallowed alive by the crocodile?

The situation has become more complicated in fact because the tiger - the state - is using the hunting techniques of the crocodile. State repression is being privatised. Not too long ago, Joseph Estrada, the movie actor who became Philippine president in 1998, lashed back at an adversarial press by banning state agencies and businesses owned by his friends from advertising in newspapers that were critical of his government. Estrada also asked one of his cronies to buy The Manila Times , a small, independent newspaper that had run investigative reports exposing anomalous contracts signed by the president. If this sounds very familiar to our Thai colleagues, it is because we are seeing in both our countries the use of new-generation techniques of media control developed for the post-dictatorial era.

In the past, angry heads of state closed down newspapers and put journalists behind bars. No longer. Instead, market mechanisms - such as advertising, ownership of shares, and payoffs made to journalists - are being used to put the lid on critical sections of the media. The constitutions and the laws crafted after the fall of authoritarianism provide us little protection against this onslaught. These developments therefore require, on the part of press-freedom advocates, the development of new techniques to counter new, more sophisticated, more insidious, and more market-oriented types of media control.

The lesson from the Estrada era is instructive. Estrada was a creation of the mass media - he was a movie actor with a larger-than-life presence on the silver screen. He was wildly popular and widely loved. Although projected as a man with a heart for the poor, the real Estrada was an alcoholic and womaniser with a taste for the good life. If Imelda Marcos had 3,000 pairs of shoes, Estrada built fabulous mansions for five mistresses. The corruption of the movie-star president was first exposed in small newspapers and the Internet. Rumors about his millions, mansions, and mistresses first made the rounds through SMS. In the end, it was the media that was his undoing - Estrada's impeachment trial was followed by millions of Filipinos on national television every day for several weeks. The media, which was once so reverential toward the president, turned into an adversary. They bucked the controls because they realised that they risked losing the market and the audience if they did not provide the information that citizens wanted.

Creating greater awareness

We must therefore begin first by understanding the market and how it works, by studying the nature of ratings, market share, and competition and figuring out how these mechanisms can be used to our advantage. We need to know our audience and to experiment with new ways to capture their hearts and minds. We must also explore the terrain of new media and small media. The advantages of new media - in terms of interactivity, speed, and relative freedom from state controls - must be maximised.

More importantly, we need to we reach out beyond the narrow confines of fellow believers in press freedom to the wider audience out there. This means making citizens aware of the real benefits they can get from a free press. We must make them realise that information controls, as we saw in the Asian crisis, pose real dangers to their long-term economic security and even, in the case of terror threats, to their physical safety.

This necessarily entails cleaning up our act, professionalising our ranks, and producing exemplary journalism so that audiences feel we are worth reading, watching, and if necessary, defending. Credible information is a market demand like any other, and there is no reason why audiences should not be asking for good reporting in the same way that they demand soap operas and football matches.

Faith in the audience and faith in our capacity to provide the audience what it needs will see us through.

A hundred years ago, when they were on the run from invading American troops, Filipino revolutionaries took with them a small transportable printing press so they could publish their newspaper wherever they fled. Gen Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the republic on the run, even wrote a directive to his troops, instructing them to transport copies of the revolutionary papers on horseback and to make sure the bundles of newspapers were wrapped in banana leaves so they would not get wet. Aguinaldo had faith that as long as Filipinos read the newspapers, they would continue to support the revolution.

This all seems very romantic now, in the age of the Internet and SMS messages, when information can be transmitted instantaneously with a minimum amount of hardware, with no need for banana leaves. What is most poignant about this story is the faith our founding fathers had in the power of the word, in the power of knowledge and information. With so many tools now in our hands, there is no reason we should not have that faith as well.

SHEILA S CORONEL is executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and a board member of the Bangkok-based Southeast Asian Press Alliance. She received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature and the creative communication arts in 2003. The above is an abstract from a keynote speech at Seapa's World Press Freedom Day celebration in Bangkok on May 3.