Theres The Rub
Sex, lies and libel
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:30:00 06/12/2008
There’s another angle to libel being a criminal offense in this country.
I remember that when I spoke in Hawaii in September 2006—this was a conference that drew in the Filipino-American community in the US, along with several Filipino public officials; I appeared with Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye in the media portion—someone in the audience raised an interesting question. In my talk, I had bitterly protested the killings, particularly of the journalists, saying these had no place in a country that was pleased to call itself a democracy. The questioner wanted to know if some of the victims had not in fact deserved their fate, being corrupt and abusive. Or was I naïve enough to imagine many journalists were not so?
I found it interesting because I had heard the same question on the occasions I spoke about the media outside Metro Manila. The media in the countryside are not universally respected, let alone loved. Many of them in fact are widely scorned, if not loathed. That is so with AM radio in particular, possibly still the most powerful medium in the provinces. It’s all people can do to call its commentators journalists, some of them showing a more resolute dedication to the pursuit of wealth and power than of truth. As someone told me in one of my sorties, many radio commentators do not get paid by radio stations at all: They volunteer their services for free—to the station. They get paid elsewhere. So, several people from my audience asked me: Didn’t some of them deserve the fate they met?
My answer to this has been, still is and will always be: I know many journalists are corrupt and abusive. But why should they be punished by death? If we agree that people who are corrupt and abusive should be killed, why pick on journalists, why not start off with public officials?
Why not indeed? It’s a very tempting proposition, but one I will strenuously resist.
That is my same point about libel. Libel, of course, is a criminal offense in this country, punishable by a jail term along with various fines. We currently have someone doing time precisely because of that, Alexander Adonis, who was sentenced to four and half years in jail for a series of commentaries alluding to Representative Prospero Nograles as the man who ran naked from a hotel room after being chased off by the husband of the woman he was having a tryst with. He has already done a couple of years in the Davao Penal Colony, as harsh a punishment as you can get. And we have someone who stands to do the same thing unless it is strenuously protested. That is, of course, Niñez Cacho-Olivares. It is iniquitous and has no place in a democracy.
What is libel basically? It’s nothing more or less than a sophisticated word for lying. Libel is lying about something or someone, and lying about it barefacedly. The latter goes by the equally sophisticated word, “malice.” Libel of course is lying of the kind that doesn’t just hide things but exposes people—wrongly—to ridicule. And for no other reason than that it satisfies someone’s sadistic bent.
I have the same question about this as about the killing of journalists: If we agree that people who lie barefacedly or maliciously about something or someone should be jailed, why pick on journalists? Why not start off with public officials?
That is a very tempting proposition, and one I will not resist.
Indeed, completely differently from the case of murder, which is not a sentence I would prescribe to either journalist or public official (unfortunately), I would most earnestly argue for jail, along with a public flogging in lieu of a fine, being meted to public officials who are caught lying. Through their teeth or through their nose, it doesn’t matter. That offense is truly criminal.
It is an offense public officials routinely commit. The most blatant case of it was Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo accusing Acsa Ramirez in public of embezzlement when the latter had in fact gone out of her way, at great risk to herself, to expose it. It might have been an honest mistake initially, however “honest” in whatever context attaches to Arroyo like cooking oil on Teflon. But it ceased to be so when Arroyo, refusing to admit her mistake, brought the whole government apparatus, not least the Philippine National Police, bearing down on Ramirez in a determined effort to prove her guilty and a perverse effort to prove herself infallible. Has ever anyone maligned another more maliciously, and for no other reason than to satisfy one’s sadistic bent?
Arrroyo has not apologized to Ramirez to this day, which adds bad manners and wrong conduct to the crime.
The consequences of public officials maligning others are far more lethal than journalists doing so. Adonis merely caused Nograles unpleasant moments with his wife and embarrassing moments with his friends—in this culture, his crime, if true, would have been getting unduly caught and not getting unduly laid. Norberto Gonzales and Raul Gonzalez have gotten political activists killed by depicting them, monumentally wrongly, as enemies of the state. The kin of the victims have yet to find redress for that vile and horrible crime. Well, one day they may yet do so by all the laws of God and man.
None of this includes the bigger lying, the one that hides the truth about things as opposed to the one that spreads the untruth about people. Although when you look at it more closely, you hide the truth about things, you malign in the end the most sacrosanct entity in this country—Juan de la Cruz. Or Inang Bayan [Motherland], take your pick. This is a regime that has distinguished itself for one thing and one thing only—lying. The cheating and stealing are mere amplifications of it, or merely share kinship with it—“ang sinungaling ay kapatid ng magnanakaw” [the liar is brother to a thief], as we say. Its very pores reek of Lie.
And we want to jail journalists for it?
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