Loses libel case filed by congressman, broadcaster lands in jail

Loses libel case filed by congressman
Broadcaster Lands in Jail
By Jose Bimbo F. Santos

MURPHY’S LAW is at work in the case of radio commentator Alex Adonis. Penniless and abandoned by his lawyer and employer, the former Bombo Radyo broadcaster is now languishing in jail for libel.
Adonis was convicted of libel for reporting that Davao Rep. Prospero Nograles (1st district) ran naked in a hotel in Manila after the woman’s husband allegedly caught them in bed in July 2001. The story was broadcast by Bombo Radyo in General Santos City.
The Manila-based tabloid Abante Tonite picked up the reported incident, which became known as the “Burlesk King” scandal.
Nograles denied the incident. Aside from Adonis, he also sued Dan Vicente, Bombo Radyo station manager, and Abante Tonite for libel.

Get people mad
Adonis, who has been in media for 18 years, was a hard-hitting political commentator. He was reported to have “lambasted on air drug lords and members of crime syndicates, government officials, and erring policemen.”
According to the embattled broadcaster, the unwritten policy in Bombo Radyo was for political commentators to be hard-hitting.
“If you don’t get people mad, you’re not doing your job,” Adonis told the Philippine Daily Inquirer and davaotoday.com correspondent Germilina Lacorte, who visited him in prison.
Bombo Radyo denied Adonis’s claim.
Three years after Nograles filed his complaint, Bombo Radyo reassigned Adonis to Cagayan de Oro. Then receiving a P7,500 salary a month, he was given an additional P3,000 allowance upon his transfer to Cagayan de Oro, which is 500 km away from Davao.

Cash-strapped
For unknown reasons, the allowance of Adonis was supposedly stopped after three months. Lacorte reported that the broadcaster had to arrange a credit line in an eatery for his meals.
“I had to rent a room at P1,000. When payday came, there was barely enough left for my children, who were already in college,” Lacorte quoted Adonis as saying. Adonis supports his wife and two children.
Cash-strapped, Adonis found it difficult to report to work and attend the court trial.
“To attend hearings, I had to finish my radio program first before I leave Cagayan de Oro that same evening, so I would arrive in Davao at 8 a.m. the next day, in time for the 9 a.m. hearing of the case. Afterwards, I had to rush back to Cagayan de Oro again in time for my radio program that same day at 6:30 in the evening,” Adonis said. “Sometimes I couldn’t even afford the bus fare to Davao.”
Cagayan de Oro is seven hours away from Davao by bus.
Not reporting to his radio station in 2005, Adonis was declared AWOL (absent without leave). His personal lawyer, whom Bombo Radyo supposedly hired, ceased to represent him. Without money to pay for another lawyer, Adonis stopped attending the hearings alto-gether. The lawyer hired by Bombo Radyo also withdrew from the case.

Conviction
On Jan. 31, Adonis was convicted in absentia. Judge Renato Fuentes of Regional Trial Court Branch 17 sentenced him to four years and six months’ imprisonment. The police arrested him on Feb. 19 at the Bangkerohan Public Market in Davao City while visiting his mother.
Vicente, who managed to attend the hearings, was acquitted after the prosecution’s primary witness died.
The 25 counts of libel Nograles filed against Abante Tonite are still under trial at the sala of Regional Trial Court Branch 15 Judge Jesus Quitain.
Sun.Star Davao reported that Adonis actually wanted to air an apology to Nograles but Bombo Radyo allegedly prevented him from doing so.
“Had it been up to me, I would have apologized, but the management directed me not to do so,” Adonis told Sun.Star Davao. Bombo Radyo denied this.
In February, the Mindanao Daily Mirror ran a Bombo Radyo statement written by Janilo Rubiato, area manager for Bombo Radyo Mindanao Division, titled, “No One to Blame but Adonis Himself.” It said:
“Adonis should not blame Bombo Radyo, his former employer, for his conviction. He only has himself to blame for his woes. His allegations that he was not allowed to make a public apology to Congressman Nograles and that Bombo Radyo did not support him are preposterous. These claims are pure lies concocted by him to gain public sympathy at the expense of his former employer who supported him and his co-accused from day one of the case.”

Immeasurable inconvenience
A few days after the April 2 story on Adonis came out on the front page of the Inquirer, Bombo Radyo said it was “Adonis who abandoned Bombo Radyo when he went on absence without leave (AWOL) sometime in December 2005.”
“This he did after dragging the network into immeasurable inconvenience brought about by court litigation,” said Rubiato.
According to Rubiato, Adonis voluntarily accepted his reassignment as anchorman of Bombo Radyo in Cagayan de Oro in the early part of 2004. The station “allocated funds for his travel, lodging, and food expenses every time he had to attend the hearings of his case in Davao.”
Rubiato claimed that most of the time, Adonis refused to claim the money “because he said he has his own resources and that food and lodging should not be a problem for him as he has his home and family here in Davao.”
Dodong Solis, dxDC station manager in Davao, who visited Adonis in jail along with Lacorte, said the commentator left the station because he felt hopeless and traumatized by the turn of events.
“He said that he thought it would be better for him to leave his job because it often got him in trouble. The situation became traumatic for him,” Solis said.

Epic injustice
Public condemnation was swift after news about Adonis’s incarceration reached the mainstream press in early April.
“You can’t have a more epic act of injustice than the jailing of Alex ‘Lex’ Adonis,” Conrado de Quiros wrote in his April 9 column in the Inquirer.
Four international media watchdogs—the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC)—condemned the incident and called for the immediate release of Adonis.
Joel Simon,  CPJ executive director, said the imprisonment of Adonis is of grave concern because “jail terms are never (an) appropriate recourse for libel convictions and could lead to self-censorship across all media outlets.”
For its part, RSF said the “sentence is disturbing for all media outlets in the Philippines” as “most provincial journalists earn very little and cannot afford a proper legal defense when lawsuits are brought against them.”
IFJ President Christopher Warren saw Adonis’ incarce-ration as “an indictment of the Philippines’ legal system.”  The “Philippine government must take immediate action to rectify this draconian legislation and free Alex Adonis,” he said.
“The IFJ has serious concerns for the safety of Adonis and calls for an immediate review of his case,” Warren added.

‘Blatant use of force’
AMARC’s regional coordi-nator Suman Basnet expressed “deepest concern and anguish over the recent conviction,” adding that the incident could be part of “the continued harassment of media workers, especially radio broadcasters in the Philippines.”
“It is appalling to note the laxity of the Government of the Philippines against the murder, kidnapping, and torturing of journalists and families. It is shameful, to say the least, the way Alex was tried in absence and under unfair conditions, and convicted. AMARC deplores this act, which is a blatant use of force against the freedom of expression of the people of the Philippines,” Basnet added.
Solis said some colleagues in media initially planned to apply for “probation” in Adonis’ case. But members of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines told them that this was not possible as “probation” could only be availed of 15 days after conviction.
Probation allows a “criminal sentenced to less than six years of prison to serve his sentence out of jail under certain conditions.”
“You’d really feel sorry for him. Unlike Nograles, Adonis doesn’t have money. He is a poor man. And because he’s poor, that’s what happened to him,”  Solis told the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR).
“He said he had given 18 years of his life to his job. He never knew that after all those years, he’d land in the Davao Penal Colony,” Solis added.
Agapito Joaquin, managing editor of The Mindanao Daily Mirror, described the incident as “a setback for us (Davao media community).” He, however, expressed reservations about the way Adonis handled the case, saying the outcome could have been different if only the radio commentator attended the trials.
“What happened to him is food for thought for us because it could also happen to us. All we have are our mouths, unlike Nograles who has money,”  Solis said.
Although Adonis’s case is only one in the growing list of court cases involving journalists, his is probably among the most disturbing because of the circumstances and the eventual outcome. Left to fend for himself after losing the support of his employer and faced with a dogged complainant, the broadcaster now suffers what used to be unthinkable for journalists, regardless of the number of libel cases they face.
Few journalists ever end up in jail because of libel. Adonis’s case may be a grim signal that that is about to change.

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