Wednesday, January 16, 2008 Malilong: Reporters as 'special' people By Frank Malilong The Other Side
MAYBE it's best to start from personal experience. Every now and then over the past few years, I have turned on my television to see an earnest reporter, standing on the steps of a courthouse, explaining his determination to go to jail rather than to reveal a confidential source.
My feelings in this situation are inevitably mixed. On the one hand, it is impressive to see anybody standing up for principle at some personal cost.
Having a fondness for journalistic types, I would rather identify with them than the judges or prosecutors trying to coerce their testimony.
Yet, probably for the very reason, I am also a bit resentful---because, in explaining their role as news gatherers, these reporters invariably emphasize how different they are from me. It is their constitutional function, I am told, to risk official wrath, snoop out information, and disclose it to the public.
As a member of that public, all I presumably must do is stay tuned. The legal distinctions the reporters draw seem to grow into a social gulf between them and me. I begin to wonder, why can't I be a glamorous and privileged investigator? Who chooses these people? After all, these are constitutional rights they're talking about. Don't I have the same right to be a reporter as they do?
The above lines are not mine. They were written 30 years ago by another lawyer and writer, Robert M. Kaus, for the Washington Monthly. But he could have written it today and still be relevant, not to mention right.
What Kaus said he felt watching the earnest reporter on the steps of a courthouse was exactly what I felt when I watched media men solemnly proclaiming, in the aftermath of the Peninsula Manila incident, how willing they were to risk life and liberty in upholding their constitutional right to inform the public.
By what divine grant did these people earn the title of official public informer? Who chose them?
Why can't an ordinary citizen have the same right to stay in the same room with Antonio Trillanes, who was the subject of a police operation, while the operation was going on? Why can't he see for himself what is taking place where and when it is taking place?
But even the government seems to think that reporters are indeed special people with special privileges. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez, for example, issued a special advisory that warned media men not to interfere in police operations if they did not want to go to jail.
Why did he have to single out media? Why didn't he just say that anyone caught interfering in police operations will be jailed?
On the other hand, I still remember the defiant faces of the "handcuffed" reporters while they were waiting to be bused to the police headquarters after Trillanes and his group had surrendered. They looked and sounded brave.
But now that Gonzalez said that they could be jailed if they pulled the same caper again, they're crying against the advisory's "chilling effect." How could a simple warning of a few nights in jail scare brave people who are even willing to lay down their lives if only to discharge their special constitutional right to inform the public?
I can't figure it out so please, somebody help me with the answer.
