LAST week, Manila Rep. Bienvenod Abante— a bishop of the Baptist church—said something in defense of his right of reply bill nearing passage in Congress that put the fear of God, even momentarily, in many journalists. He said scores of Filipino journalists have been killed in the last few years because, he surmised, subjects of their stories had not ventilated their side in the press.

“If you can’t ventilate in writing ... what will a person do but assassinate the journalist? If we include this [provision], it might drastically reduce such incidents,” Abante said.

We can call this the Argument from Violence; we can also call it for what it is: totally bogus.

In the first place, this is a false choice. The subject of a critical story is not limited to only two options, to “ventilate in writing” or to “assassinate the journalist.” Perhaps among the politicians Abante associates with, that meager menu is all they feast on. But the millions of responsible citizens that form the great body politic shun violence, cannot even begin to think that assassination is a decent, or even a reasonable, course of action.

Secondly, Abante’s “argument” is a fatally flawed reading of reality. Journalists have been killed—in record numbers under the Arroyo administration—not because suspects failed to have a letter to the editor published; journalists have been killed because they published, period. They printed a story, or aired a broadcast, that took aim at wrongdoing in their communities; those who were killed because of their stories were assassinated, to appropriate Abante’s term of art, not because they failed to “get the other side,” but because their stories saw the light of day. Powerful people with guns and goons at their disposal, especially in remoter areas, do not consider violence as a last resort; for them, ventilation in the press or not, it is a ready option.

Memo to Abante: Those who kill journalists do so because they have something to hide.

We realize, of course, that Abante’s view is shared by other politicians who are behind the bill; this is profoundly disturbing, not only because they trivialize the tragedy of journalists’ killings, but also and mainly because they cynically offer the bill as a belated and brazenly irrelevant answer to a life-or-death issue. They propose the bills as a solution, to a problem they refuse to understand.

Elsewhere in today’s opinion pages, the reader will find other arguments against right of reply legislation. Joaquin Bernas, SJ offers a meditation on the implications of freedom of speech, and then identifies the true but unacknowledged beneficiary of a right of reply law: already powerful public officials themselves. “[T]here is another element of free speech jurisprudence which makes me think that these bills are more protective of public officials, and especially of lawmakers, than of anybody else.”

Conrado de Quiros revisits a theme he has returned to again and again in the last few months, and zeroes in on the worst consequence of a right of reply law, the elimination of criticism: “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.”

This reflects other arguments this newspaper and its commentators have pushed forward in the last several weeks. Just last Friday, we sought to rename the proposed legislation for what it really is: a right to edit, a right to publish, which the bills’ authors propose to grant to non-journalists. The effect of this grant, De Quiros

asserts, is ultimately the silencing of the critical voice which sustains democratic discourse. The ultimate beneficiary, Bernas argues, is the whole class of public officials, who have the duty to listen to what the public is saying through the media, but would now have the excuse, if the law were enacted, to force the public, using the same media, to listen to them instead. This is, to use Bernas’ resonant phrase, nothing less than an official hijacking.