Viewpoint
Moonlighting and tapeworms
By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:28:00 10/07/2008
MANILA, Philippines—“Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial ‘we,’” Mark Twain once cracked.
Senators Aqulino Pimentel, Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., Francis Escudero and Rep. Monico Puentevella don’t host tapeworms. But they scratch the same itch: to barge into newsrooms and, as moonlighting editors, decide what may be aired or printed.
“We must level the playing field in journalism,” fumes Puentevella. The Bacolod media bushwhacked him unfairly, he claimed. So he filed House Bill 3306. This compels right of reply.
The House bill is a clone of Senate Bill 2150. Paternity for this stinker is credited to Pimentel, Revilla and Escudero. Both measures stipulate that a reply must be published or aired on the same page or program. They should be of the same length or time. They must be free. Publish or air within 24 hours, demands Puentevella. Make that three days, the senators say.
Or else? Recalcitrant editors or station managers will be dunned up to P50,000. Puentevella jacks the ante to P200,000, plus 30 days in jail. A paper could be padlocked. The franchise of an “offending” station could be suspended or cancelled.
Wait. They have more. After replies are published or aired, offended parties may sue for libel. The bill has a “sunset clause”: it self-destructs seven years from approval. So did Marcos ever leave?
The President, Senator Revilla or even Commander Kato could muscle editors aside — and dictate a newspaper’s contents. Puentevella and Escudero of “Brat Pack” notoriety could order stations what to air and when. That’d turn newsrooms into stamp pads.
But Sen. Francis Pangilinan approvingly weighed in with a cliché: “Freedoms are limited.”
“There are absolutes in our Bill of Rights,” Justice Hugo Black once wrote. “They were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions were absolute.”
“Sunset” sops don’t validate constitutionally flawed measures. “No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, expression and of the press.” Constitutional Law 101 drills that inviolable ban against prior restraint into students.
The press has no quarrel with fairness in replies, the Cebu Citizens Press Council stressed in a Dec. 14, 2007 position paper. The Codes of Ethics of the Inquirer and the Cebu Daily News as well as the Philippine Press Institute and Associated Press stress fair play and similar norms.
Major papers and Cebu newspapers, for example, have self-regulatory mechanisms to ensure that “the other side” is sought in first reports. Opinion pages provide space for replies. Complaints may be lodged with newspaper ombudsmen or press councils against lack of fairness.
But only dictatorships barge into newsrooms to usurp editorial functions. “Legislated right to reply operates as a command,” states the Cebu Media Legal Aid group. “[It resembles] a statute … forbidding the newspaper to publish specified matter. This is prior restraint. If media cannot be told what to publish, it cannot be told what not to publish.”
Thus, Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara withdrew his bill (HB 162). “We realize editorial functions are privately exercised prerogatives,” he wrote the Cebu Citizens Press Council. “We appeal to media for fairness and judiciousness.”
The issue posed by House Bill 3306 is: Can persons “interfere with editorial judgment”? Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. pointed out with newsroom directness. “Can they dictate to publishers or editors on how to publish and present a written response to a newspaper article?”
The US Supreme Court ruled in 1974 on a right-of-reply protest, Locsin recalled. Florida candidate Pat Tornillo sued the Miami Herald, citing local right-to-reply statutes. The Herald insisted that the statute fractured the Constitution’s ban on prior restraint.
A newspaper is not just a “passive receptacle” for news, comment or ads, the court ruled. Decisions on content, format and “treatment of public issues and public officials — whether fair or unfair — constitute exercise of editorial control and judgment.” The Florida statute “intruded into the function of editors.”
“Government may not force a newspaper to print copy which, in its journalistic discretion, it chooses to leave on the newsroom’s floor,” as Justice Byron White put it.
The Puno Supreme Court has hewn closely to this constitutional tradition. It spiked Department of Justice and National Telecommunications Commission warnings against airing the “Hello, Garci” tapes. This threat to gag constituted “prior restraint.” It challenged “the most exalted of all civil rights, the freedom of expression,” Puno wrote.
A free press is not necessarily an angelic or an infallible press. Pseudo-journalists, a.k.a. walk-in block timers, for instance, smear as radio stations content themselves with disclaimers. Corruption taints our ranks, too. Our besotting sin is often superficiality.
We’ve slid “towards the new impatient journalism of assertion rather than verification,” Bill Kovacs of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation notes. A press “unable to separate fact from spin, argument from innuendo exacts too high a price from society.”
These issues are best addressed by the press itself, not government squatting on editorial chairs. “We cannot be lapdogs grateful to be patted on heads by presidents,” then-editor Teodoro Locsin Jr. told a 1996 Singapore seminar. “It is the first and last responsibility of journalists to tell things as they are, as he sees them, as he knows them — to be right or to be wrong.”
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Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
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