MANILA, Philippines—I remember again what I told my friends at a conference abroad the other year. My friends, who were journalists from various Islamic countries, many of whom labored from all sorts of restrictions in their chosen profession, expressed their envy of the Philippines which they saw as enjoying a free press.

I said our problem was a curious one, and not altogether the lighter one. True enough, I said, we were free to say anything in newspapers and radio and TV that could be backed up by evidence (we had libel laws) and sometimes even with the lack of it (we had outfits that could do with the free advertisement libel brought). Unfortunately, nobody minded it. The press is free to expose officials as crooks, but the crooks remain free to continue to steal anyway. Certainly they remain free.

At least in older—now forgotten—times, public officials bristled at being called “buayas” (crocodiles), which compelled them to be a little more circumspect in their theft, thereby limiting its scale. Today, the press exposes or calls public officials crooks, and the crooks laugh all the way to the bank. Who cares about being called a crook when it entitles you to more loot while being called a whistle-blower merely entitles you to a term in jail?

It’s an incredible situation where words no longer seem to have any visible effect on reality. That is the sound of a country losing its soul.

I remember this in light of the “right of reply” bill sponsored by Nene Pimentel which has passed the Senate with no one opposing it and which is due to pass the House anytime now. Frankly, I can’t understand why my friend persists in ramming through this unmitigated folly. There’s nothing more perverse and ill-timed.

We’ve just seen one of the most horrendous spectacles of official wrongdoing ever to be sprung before us—quite a feat given the procession of epic wrongdoing that has passed before our eyes—in the form of the World Bank implicating the First Gentleman in a rip-off hatched by three WB-funded Filipino firms. The public went up the hill to call for heads to fall, the press went (down) to town calling the implicated companies and officials crooks, or as much so as libel laws allowed. The result of all this sound and fury was to signify—and to prove my point above—nothing.

Well, not altogether nothing. It also signified comedy, or atrocity, as befitted the chair of committee heading the investigation, Miriam Santiago. Stung by the uprising, Santiago promptly climbed onto her white horse and ran after ... the World Bank. I myself can only imagine the UN congratulating itself happily for not making her an international jurist, if only because her sponsor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, sponsored her. If several Serbian villages accused another of their former leaders of war crimes, she would have mounted the same high horse and ridden after ... the villagers. At least Somalian jurists, one of which the UN picked in her stead, know which direction to face, or which side of the horse is the head and which the ass.

Pimentel’s bill is a variation of this. Our problem is that despite having a free press that does not fail to call crooks crooks, our crooks do not fail to get away. The obvious solution to everyone, including the truant kids in my neighborhood, is to not let the crooks get away. The solution to Pimentel is to not let the press get away.

That is what his bill does, whatever his intentions, whatever his motives. There is nothing innocent about it. The Inquirer has already pointed out the lunacy of his bill in its editorials. I’ve done the same in several columns in past months. Suffice it to say here that this bill will stamp out criticism entirely. Yes, entirely. That is so because of a very real fear on the part of media. That fear is not the “chilling effect” that many journalist organizations are citing. If Filipino journalists have shown anything, it is courage over and beyond the call of duty, or the lure of meager pay. That fear is being reduced to becoming the advertising or PR firms of public officials.

Why on earth should media be scared per se about officials answering back? Media have always shown a higher IQ, if not higher moral standards (barring the crooks in media, who arguably thrive as well), than public officials. But you now criticize a public official, and whether he or she is guilty or not, he or she will have the right to occupy space in your news. The guiltier, the louder. Or worse, the lengthier. With elections in particular round the corner, every official who gets criticized, will get to strut his hour upon the stage, or its equivalent in media. That is still another variation on government’s favorite pastime of rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.

If you’re a newspaper or a radio or TV station, you will balk at criticizing a public official, or indeed even praising him or her—they can always construe it as faint praise—out of the absolute, terrifying, spine-tingling fear not of him refuting you but of him robbing you of precious space. Still another favorite government pastime, robbing. Space that could, and should, be used for legitimate news, which you now have to allocate to illegitimate, or unpaid, PR. Yet still other favorite government pastimes, fomenting illegitimacy and not paying. That is the sound of news dying. Or being strangled.

However you slice it, and dice it, and spice it, the “right of reply” sucks, and sucks big time. Of course Malacañang says GMA means to block it, as she will not have the media curtailed in any way. That makes her out to be a staunch champion of press freedom, to which every journalist has every right to reply in the gravest and solemnest of terms:

Hahahahahahahaha!