Column: The meaning of Maria Ressa’s Nobel Peace Prize is ‘manang-hood’

Journalists are both the older siblings and the utility workers of democracy. Published in Rappler on December 8, 2021.

The four founders of Rappler are fondly called Manangs by the people who work with them; even some people outside work have taken to calling them that too. The term “manang” means “older sister” in some Philippine languages; its likely root is the Spanish for sister, “hermana.” (And from the Spanish for “older brother,” we may have gotten “manong.”)

But the terms are also used as a friendly honorific: They describe an older person worthy of respect. It is different from an honorific like “Gat,” which because it is ennobling (it is best understood as a title of nobility) is also estranging. Gat Jose Rizal is someone we look up to, usually from a distance; Manong Pepe Rizal is someone we know quite well, whom we can have a beer with.

The Filipino farm workers who immigrated to the United States in the 1920s and the 1930s were called manongs then, and are forever remembered as manongs now. Many of them were from the Ilocos, whose language uses the term in the sense of older brother. They were not, they could not have been, all older brothers, but they were old familiars, and deserving of respect.

But in Filipino culture, the role of the older sibling is burdened by real responsibilities; the manang and the manong are like surrogate parents, who help look after, who help raise, and in some instances who help pay for the education of, the younger siblings.

Case study: Cabacungan vs. Rappler

I asked my current class in Media and Politics to analyze the plagiarism issue against Rappler started by my former Inquirer colleague Gil Cabacungan Jr. last April, as the subject of their first small-group case study. Their case study reports (submitted a month ago today, and returned the second week of May) proved to be well-researched, and their analysis solid and straightforward—so much so that I asked my students’ permission if I could post highlights of their reports in public. Take a look.

Column: Not like any other administration

Column No. 619—and the tenth this year that the editors of Inquirer.net declined to run. But published on October 27, 2020 in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, on INQ Plus, and on Inquirer Mobile. The (ironic) point of the column: Don’t normalize democratic decay.

It was a privilege to join Sheila Coronel of the Columbia School of Journalism, Jim Gomez of the Associated Press, Maria Ressa of Rappler, and Ging Reyes of ABS-CBN news and current affairs in a Daang Dokyu forum moderated by Roby Alampay of One News last Friday. The task at hand was to describe the state of journalism in the Philippines and, even at two hours, the time was not nearly enough.

“What press freedom?”

I served as a session moderator in a webinar for diplomats this morning. My session was an exploration of the current media landscape in the Philippines, led by three expert guides who walked us through the thickets of business ownership, the deserts and occasional oases of press freedom, the hills and valleys of media consumption. One of our guides was Vergel Santos, a true eminence in Philippine journalism, who read a powerful speech that posed difficult questions about freedom of the press. I asked his permission to run his words here; may they disturb us in all the right ways.

By Vergel O. Santos

Not long ago, our pioneering national pollster Social Weather Stations did a survey on the state of press freedom in the Philippines. Actually, anyone observant enough needs no survey to be able to tell that press freedom hereabouts is in grave danger.

In fact, not seldom, Philippine surveys, for all their professional and well-meant zeal, tend more to confuse than to inform, let alone to enlighten. And sometimes they end up only shaking, instead of validating, one’s trust in what one’s own eyes plainly see and what one’s own ears plainly hear.

“[A] Duterte scam …
consists of false hopes
and quick fixes
held out in an iron hand.”

But that’s not always the pollsters’ fault. Pollsters only ask and count. They don’t explain or reason out their findings; they are not expected to do that. And neither does everything they get out of their respondents lends itself to any confident deciphering.

Findings on other issues — not just press freedom — and by pollsters in general — not just SWS — are similarly befogged. Constitutional change, federalization, and authoritarianism are all roundly opposed, extrajudicial killing is condemned, the Chinese are distrusted, yet, despite President Duterte’s express espousal of all that, he remains popular.

I seem to detect two mutually reinforcing factors driving and muddling these surveys: one is the fear struck by Duterte’s high-handed regime in the hearts of many, the other a compulsion among a long-suffering people to try to square everything in their minds in order to rationalize their desperate hopes — and these are people who happen to be just the precise type to fall easy prey to a Duterte scam, which consists of false hopes and quick fixes held out in an iron hand.

Column: What’s missing in Judge Montesa’s summary

Published on June 23, 2020.

In the week since Judge Rainelda Estacio Montesa convicted Maria Ressa and Reynaldo Santos Jr. of cyberlibel—in a decision we in the Consortium on Democracy and Disinformation described as “uncomprehending, unconstitutional, unjust”—immediate outrage was followed by a multi-pronged defense of both the decision and the judge, and then a more muted, more measured response focused on the serious consequences of the decision’s unusual legal reasoning.

What these last two categories of response have mainly in common is a willing acceptance of the summary of the facts as detailed by the judge. A lawyer who used to work in the Supreme Court told me as much: “Never mind the summary of evidence. But the interpretation of the law? I don’t know.”

It is true that the real problem—for both Ressa and Santos and for ordinary citizens—lies with the way the law was misinterpreted. The judge enabled a law to extend backward in time, in violation of the Constitution’s clear prohibition on ex post facto laws; and she extended the prescription period from one year to 12 years, again by going back in time, misusing a 1926 law to treat cyberlibel as a new crime.

But I would also like to contest the fairness of Judge Montesa’s summary of the facts.

Column: A nauseous verdict, an ignorant judge

Column No. 600, published on June 16, 2020.

Together with Marites Vitug, I served as a co-moderator of “The Trial of Maria Ressa et al” yesterday. It was an online forum that took place on the same morning a court found Maria Ressa and Reynaldo Santos Jr. guilty of cyberlibel. Our panel of experts from around the world—Peter Greste of the University of Queensland in Brisbane; Ann Marie Lipinski of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Queen’s Counsel, of the law firm Doughty Street Chambers in London; and Free Legal Assistance Group chair Chel Diokno—made excellent points recorded in part through that breaking news platform, Twitter. But when news of the guilty verdict broke, nothing quite summed up the sense of dismay and outrage we all felt than Greste’s simple remark. Having once spent 400 days in an Egyptian jail for doing journalism, he understood the bleak prospects Ressa faces intimately. When he heard the guilty verdict, he said, simply: “I feel sick.”

Column: Who’s afraid of Maria Ressa?

Published on June 11, 2020. 

On Monday, June 15, Judge Rainelda Estacio-Montesa of the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 46 will issue her decision in the controversial cyberlibel case against journalist Maria Ressa, former Rappler researcher-writer Reynaldo Santos Jr., and Rappler itself. The decision will be watched closely in newsrooms across the country and around the world.

Will Estacio-Montesa uphold the storied tradition in Philippine jurisprudence that has long favored the triple right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to “freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press”? Or will she find that Ressa, Santos, and Rappler have met the elements of libel, including the difficult criteria for malice, when the online news site published its story about the late former chief justice Renato Corona and his unseemly practice of using vehicles owned by “controversial businessmen,” on May 29, 2012?

Column: Assault on press freedom? Q and A

Published on February 19, 2019.

Last week, on Twitter, I was asked by someone critical of Rappler editor Maria Ressa whether I had ever been sued for libel. (Yes, I said, twice for libel and once for cyberlibel.) The reason for the question became clear when I gave my answer. “Did you also cry for suppression of press freedom?” was the response.

Well, no—because the circumstances are completely different. My second, longer answer is rooted in the current Philippine context; perhaps the following short question-and-answer can quickly describe that context.

Is libel, per se, an attack on press freedom?

No, but many journalists have long sought the decriminalization of libel in the Philippines, because it hampers free speech and the freedom of the press. Decriminalization would render libel and other forms of defamation only a civil offense, punishable not by imprisonment but the payment of fines.

When, as happens often enough in the Philippines, libel suits (or the mere threat of legal action) are used to stop news coverage and publication, or prevent journalists from doing their work, then our libel laws, which date back to 1932 when the Philippines was still an American colony, are turned into weapons against the freedom of the press.

Column: Which PH institutions are pushing back? (2)

(Photo from WJP launch announcement)

Published on February 13, 2018.

At the launch of the Rule of Law Index in Washington, DC the other week, forum moderator Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace asked a crucial question. In those countries like Venezuela and the Philippines where adherence to the rule of law has weakened (as measured according to the Index’s eight factors), which institutions were “pushing back”? In my answer, I distinguished between institutions that are pushing back and institutions that are “holding fast” (including a military which abhors the vacuum of politicization and a Roman Catholic Church which, despite its efforts to engage the government policy agenda, is seen by Duterte supporters as anti-Duterte).

What do I understand by pushing back? It might be best to cite specific examples.

Column: ‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome Rappler?’

Published on January 16, 2018, after the Duterte regime’s continuing offensive against press freedom entered a new and more dangerous phase. Please also see: 10-tweet thread I posted on the same day the column came out.

If you squint hard enough, you can pretend that the little you see in front of you is the most important thing to see. If you do it long enough, you can even convince yourself that the little you do see is all there is to see in the world.

This sleight of sight explains the decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission, when it ruled that Rappler, the social media network, had violated constitutional restrictions on foreign ownership of media entities and revoked its certificate of incorporation. If this revocation stands, Rappler will effectively be shut down — the first time a news organization will be closed by government action since the dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972.