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PENDING
in the Philippine Congress is a whistle-blower bill that
purports to set clearer guidelines, to encourage and
protect people who are genuinely interested in exposing
anomalies in whatever sector, and correct wrong
practices and redress the wrong done to whoever deserves
justice.
The bill
is part of a stream of initiatives worldwide, all
focused toward promoting greater transparency and
accountability in public life; the recently released
Global Accountability Report, rendered by One World
Trust—a nongovernment organization (NGO) in Special
Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and
Social Council—is of such a piece.
That
initiative covers not just state agencies worldwide but
also private companies and even NGOs, based on the
important premise that governance is everyone’s, not
just the state’s, responsibility; and that good
government doesn’t end with trying to improve the
bureaucracy, as every sector in society—yes, especially
the businessmen who keep complaining about being
extortion victims but won’t think twice about giving
bribes, paying off fixers, or taking shortcuts, and
those sanctimonious civil-society leaders—must also
practice what they preach.
That
said, however, it is also just as wrong and incomplete
to think that having whistle-blower rules and laws is
like waving a magic wand to produce a corruption-free
society. The one missing link in any national effort to
promote transparency and accountability is that sector
that finds itself under siege again these days:
ironically, the supposed “free-wheeling” media.
Today,
Tuesday, the Senate opens a hearing into the
handcuffing-and-detention episode that provided a bitter
postscript to the November 29 standoff at the Manila
Peninsula in Makati City. Instead of the event being
assessed for what it exactly was, so much attention has
unfortunately been devoted to the sideshow provided by
government teams tying the hands of news workers—print,
radio and TV reporters and technical teams alike—and
hauling them off in buses to Bicutan’s Camp Bagong Diwa.
Besides
the Senate, yet another venue for the ensuing debate on
media role is the Commission on Human Rights, where the
National Press Club has filed a petition on behalf of
those arrested.
Last
week the government made a big show of a “dialogue”
between mediamen on one hand and, on the other,
officials of Malacañang, the Department of the Interior
and Local Government, and military and police top brass.
Unfortunately, the dialogue right at Manila Pen itself,
the “scene of the crime,” was marred by ugly exchanges,
especially when Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno dropped
his classic threat to “arrest journalists again” if a
similar situation occurs, on the dubious premise that
“mere presence” could be construed as obstruction of
justice.
What
that dialogue showed was a tragic misunderstanding by
the government of the role of mass media. These guys are
good at spouting rhetoric about this country being a
democracy, where mediamen are given complete freedom and
the cases of journalists being killed are really
“isolated.”
And yet,
when crunch time came, rhetoric melted, and the real
character of those in power surfaced: the official
attitude is that mediamen are for the most part nosy
pests who must be corralled and spoon-fed in briefings
in air-conditioned rooms—away from the real action, and
subjected to all sorts of guidelines.
In the
real world, however, in case they haven’t heard,
mediamen are in the frontlines—read: danger areas—most
of the time in whatever part of the globe they may be
covering, and that is an accepted fact of life.
They
will be the last to think of themselves in case of war,
a state of siege or any situation of conflict because
their main duty is to get to the truth and document and
share it. If they have to interview an insurgent besides
interviewing a military officer, if only to understand a
situation, they will do it. It is de rigeur for
journalists to find themselves often in the thick of,
say, a hostage situation, a demolition operation, a
massive rally or riot, or a coup d’état.
Journalists live with those things and accept the risks
because, hey, every profession has its own innate risks.
When journalists put themselves in harm’s way, they
simply are following a revered tradition.
The line
is drawn only when they actively put other people in
harm’s way to get the news. Or, if they knowingly lend
themselves as chroniclers with advance knowledge that a
crime, say an ambush or raid of a community, is about to
be committed. But this doesn’t mean that they are
duty-bound to report to every Tom, Dick or Harry in
government any “tip” or raw information they may get,
for then, ferreting out such is the work of intelligence
agencies.
So when
authorities impede the work of journalists as in the
Manila Pen (reporters were unable to write their stories
and their editors and colleagues outside pieced these
together from their blow-by-blow accounts), they impede
the flow of information, so important to a public that
needs to understand what’s going on in the country.
If some
rebel soldiers pose as journalists, that is not the
mediamen’s problem, or responsibility, unless they
willingly give or lend their ID cards or other
paraphernalia to these people.
Most of
this generation’s journalists have covered during
martial law; they have lived through the coup attempts
against the Aquino administration; covered Edsa 1, 2 and
3. They know the journalistic guidelines by heart. And
in any case, in a conflict, all they have to fall back
on is the Constitution.
The
worst thing that concerned officials have done in the
Manila Pen case is to lump together journalists with the
newsmakers they cover: exactly the same mistake of the
Marcos dictatorship, which raided the WE Forum 25 years
ago and lost, two years later, in the Supreme Court.
The WE
Forum and the rest of the Burgos papers and the
“mosquito press” thrived—and brought the country nearer
back to democracy—because whistle blowers did their job
then, whether they came from government, private
business or civil society.
Today,
there is a palpable drive toward encouraging
whistle-blowing worldwide: but they can’t be anywhere
near effective if the disseminators of the truth they
expose, the journalists, are fettered. |
