Out on a limb

“Our gut feeling is President Benigno Aquino will still deliver on his election campaign pledge to get a Freedom of Information law on the books.” We wrote that forecast when 15th Congress, just started its sessions.

Did we clamber out on a limb?

Led by Rep. Ben Evardone of Eastern Samar , the. Lower House Committee blocked a vote on the long stalled FOI bill .Then, Nueva Ecija Rep. Rodolfo Antonino snarled deliberations further by insisting that a right-of-reply ( RoR) provision be stitched into FOI.

“The calculated incompetence of the House committee…led to the outcome it wanted all along,” Inquirer’s editorial “House Hypocrites” pointed out. “The House leadership, and the administration it closely works with, do not want the FOI cause to advance.”

On the final day, of the 14th Congress pro Macapagal-Arroyo congressmen sabotaged FOI. Led by Prospero Nograles ( Davao ) and Pedro Romualdo (Camiguin),. they killed the measure – which needed a few minutes for ratification – by an old dodge of questioning the quorum.

Day after FOI's massacre, President Aquino pledged to fast-track the measure in the 15th Congress. That’d make FOI the "very first legacy" of the 15th Congress under the Aquino III administration, Deputy Speaker Erin Tanada predicted then.

Today, “there is only a month remaining for the 15th Congress, ”: Tanada noted. .” There may still be time for the committee to redeem itself and report out the bill to plenary”. The track record may provide some indicators.

Antonino’s bid to hitch an RoR in the Freedom of Information bill came in HBill 4252 which sports a grandiose title: “Freedom of Information and Transparency Act of 2011.” It exhumes the remains of “right of reply” measures, buried by the previous Congress”, Inquirer said ( Viewpoint / 28 June 2011)

HB 4252’s booby trap is stashed in Section 10: “ Opportunity to Reply.” Aggrieved parties can demand that their replies to criticism be published “in the same space” of newspapers or the same program in broadcast. Replies “be published or broadcast not later than three days.”

These provisions were snitched from Rep. Monico Puentevella’s House Bill 3306 and Senators Bong Revilla and Francis “Chiz” Escudero’s Senate Bill 2150. Both measures were scrapped in Congress for constituting “prior restraint”.

“Any prior restraint… must hurdle a high barrier,” Justice Antonio Carpio wrote in his tightly-reasoned concurring opinion for the National Telecommunications case (GR No 168338). “Such prior restraint is presumed unconstitutional. (And) government bears a heavy burden of proving constitutionally of such restraint.”

Thus, authors like Sen. Francisco Escudero withdrew support. “We recognize editorial functions are privately exercised prerogatives,” Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara wrote.

Cebu Citizens Press Council filed a carefully-reasoned protest a full year before today’s quagmire. Anchor “Che-Che” Lazaro fretted these bills violated “prior restraint” in ABS-CBN’s “Media In Focus” program.

On Internet, “legislated right of reply would be more preposterous,” writes Nini Cabaero. “A website is venue for online journalism. It’s updated several times a day as news develops. Or it can be removed at will.” If RoR bills became law, aggrieved parties – say those zapped for ZTE broadband scams or collusion in World Bank road bids – can shape web pages, based on their grievances, not the news.

Do their replies stay in the webpage one minute? Quarter of an hour? As long as the offending story stayed on said page? “What is adequate compliance?” “News can break at anytime,” Cabaero notes. What if a major story happens, say Ferdinand Marcos Jr would give up all the money looted by the “New Society”? Web pages would be immediately recast. T That’s the character of internet. Today, editors have the prerogative to recast. But Antonino, Evardone would muscle aside editors and decide.

Internet’s unique character makes it possible for websites to dodge RoR laws, Cabaero notes. Posted in one minute, a reply can be removed the next. Will it stay only for as long as the source views it? Or when editors say enough?” Tanada made the sensible proposal: Let the RoR stand and fall on it’s merits or flaws.

Cory Aquino dismantled the Marcos censorship machine. At the Inquirer’s 25th anniversary meet, PNoy recalled his father lived by the belief that –quoting Ninoy --- “A free media is indispensable if a democracy is to function efficiently, if it is to be real. The people, who are sovereign, must be adequately informed all the time.”

PNoy can always plead loss of memory,. After all, “the pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong,”. But for PNoy to spurn his parents’ sterling legacy is --what’s is the polite word for BS?

Media has no power or right to swap a constitutional shield for concessions. If that privilege is peddled, the press sells out its very soul, like Faustus. There are absolutes in our Bill of Rights,” Justice Hugo Black wrote. “They were put there by men who understood what words meant, and meant their prohibitions were absolute.”*

( Email: juan_mercado77@yahoo.com )

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