Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Salami-style interdicts

Salami-style interdicts


Updated 00:09am (Mla time) Dec 21, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 21, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


"CRUDE threats by local martinets and subtle encroachment are directed against media, even as it struggles to upgrade professional standards...Officials swear they're partisans for liberty--but threaten to padlock critical stations or ban independent reporters."

That's not drug-riddled Colombia or thug-ruled Zimbabwe. That's Cebu, say journalists, who know the place like the back of their hands, in a pooled editorial titled, "Dreams in a time of trouble." Cebu's newspapers and stations came up with this hard-nosed assessment during their September Press Freedom Week celebration.

Now, two metro mayors have ratcheted discriminatory pressure on press members who don't join their political parades. In so doing, they've confirmed that evaluation.

American and Filipino agents busted one of Southeast Asia's largest drug factories in Mayor Thadeo Ouano's Mandaue City. In "the Philippines' shabu capital," Ouano, his cops, barangay and building officials told a wishy-washy House committee they knew nothing, heard nothing and said nothing. Just like the proverbial three monkeys?

But even simians can get midnight adrenalin. Mandaue suddenly did to ABS-CBN's regional station what it spared their shabu factory: It issued a notice of illegal electrical connection.

That dyAB, the network's AM station, had raked over Ouano and Co. for the drug scandal was coincidental, Ouano said. "OBO's notice was not intended to harass ABS-CBN...The city issued similar notices to 20 companies."

"There is never a paucity of arguments in favor of limiting press freedom," US Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter once wryly observed.

Next door, Mayor Tomas Osmeña announced he'd ban the GMA network from covering the January Sinulog grand parade at the Cebu City Sports Center. This is a public event, in an official site with P8-million taxpayers' contribution. But GMA's dySS features the multi-awarded Bobby Nalzaro, a critic of the mayor.

But the ban is "very mild," Osmeña protested. Anyway, he claims "the power to close and cancel the franchise of GMA 7." He'd padlock the station for refusing to accept the paid ads of the city which has P1.7 million in unpaid IOUs. A settle-debts-first policy of the Kapisanan Ng Brodkasters, which GMA-7 implemented, is censorship, he claimed.

No kidding? Last I heard the authority that grants or cancel franchises rests exclusively with Congress. Any mayor who arrogates that power to himself faces the business end of a usurpation suit.

But habits die hard. In 1996, then private citizen Tomas Osmeña signed, on behalf of Metro Cebu Development project, official loan papers with the Japanese government. Sen. John Osmeña threatened to clobber him with a "usurpation of official functions" suit.

Access to news event is absolutely fundamental to journalists. Thus, in Subido v. Ozaeta, the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional protection covers access.

Jurisprudence in democratic countries echoes that principle. In Hawaii, the US district court struck down Mayor Frank Fasi's ban against reporters of the Honolulu Star Bulletin reporters attending his press conferences. "Only compelling government interests" can prop up such bans, it said.

But Osmeña claims he can bestow or withhold, at whim, access to news. This is constitutional nonsense. A basic human right cannot be held hostage to personal vendettas. The Charter's provision on the press is not hemmed in by qualifications.

"There are absolutes in our Bill of Rights," US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote. "They were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant that the prohibitions were absolute."

Osmeña used the same argument to ban, in 2001, reporters of dyHP, Sun Star and Radyo Bombo from City Hall press conferences. He cribbed that from the often-soused Joseph Estrada who denied Inquirer reporters access to Malacañang press conferences. Pakistan's Nawar Sharif also banned the Jang newspaper. Sharif is in exile. And Estrada is in the clink.

These are discriminatory interdicts. They differ from Marcos' brass-knuckle padlocking of the press in its obviousness, and are cruder than arm-twisting behind the scenes. The mayor's late father, then Gov. Sergio Osmeña, muzzled the independent Southern Star by asking the daily's owners: "Somos o no somos" (Are you with me or against me?)

The governor pressured firms to yank out their ads from the Republic Daily, owned by the Cuencos. Decades later, Joseph Estrada prodded first his movie industry buddies, then businessmen to cut ads for the Inquirer. That flopped too.

Nonetheless, Osmeña and Ouano barrel into salami-slicing of press freedoms. "The greatest danger to liberty," US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, "lurks in the encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Journalism "is not a comfortable profession for fat cats," Guardian editor Peter Preston told an International Press Institute meeting. "We write or broadcast to make sure the world knows what is happening in what would otherwise be dark recesses of people behaving at their worst."

Some do the task brilliantly. Others just get by. Some are incompetent and should be fired. A number sell out or, as the late publisher Eugenio Lopez once said, "serve as megaphones for the powerful."

But journalists are "prisoners of a necessary cause." Our craft is "a barricade where we encounter opposition, confusion, sometimes personal peril," Preston writes. "But you have to be on the side of [liberty of expression], because there is no other side to be on."

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