Friday, October 03, 2008 Seares: Right to reply, again By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
CEBU journalists had long taken their stand on legislated right to reply (RTR).
Last year, editors and media lawyers met and decided to oppose the bill. Later, the position was adopted by Cebu Citizens-Press Council (CCPC) in a Dec. 14, 2007 resolution, which it sent to senators and House members.
The Senate passed the bill anyway. Although one congressman junked support after reading the CCPC resolution, the House is set to approve it.
You can't knock sense into legislators who loathe media. Its author in the House, Bacolod Rep. Monico Puentevella, is hopping mad about some journalists. For alleged sins of Negros media, he wants to inflict on all media in the country the RTR bill.
I won't go again into CCPC's arguments that the bill is unconstitutional, unnecessary, and open to abuse. The proposal being nutty, however, needs a revisit.
Editorial judgment
What I find crazy is the idea that editorial judgment can be legislated at all.
Editorial content can't be dictated by politicians who sue or by fiscals and judges who litigate grievance against journalists.
Screws are surely loose when they require a reply to be printed or aired on the same space, hour, and length as the replied-to story. And don't they ever see how much space or time replies from scores of people will fill and how much regular content they will bump off?
Then there's the absurd idea that block-timers who buy radio time are exempted because they have their own code of ethics.
If they can't even distinguish work of journalists from crap of block-timers, lawmakers have no business tinkering with media process at all.
