In Medias Res Archives | Page 16 of 26

Predictably, hopelessly dead

THE FREEDOM of Information bill has been passed over again. Colleagues flocked to the hearings on it in the current congress hoping this one, unlike the previous congresses, was serious. Theirs had been a desperate hope—as my own, to which I had clung for some timeout of some sense...

Media endorsing candidates

United States (US) newspapers endorsed their preferred candidate for President a few days before the November 6 US elections. On the day of the elections themselves, some of the US TV networks also projected who the winner would be. According to the American Presidency Project, of the top 100 US...

A system of inherited power

SENATOR ALAN Peter Cayetano, who’s been in the Senate together with his sister Pia for five years, and whose late father was himself a member of that body, said last week that there’s nothing wrong with political dynasties per se. It depends on whether a political family—which by dint...

Unabridgeable freedom

TWO PROPOSED laws critical to news-media practice are up for consideration in the Senate: one advances the practice by decriminalizing libel, the other suppresses it by abridging the very freedom on which it is founded—an abridgment the Constitution itself disallows, yet Congress insists on. For all its patent unconstitutionality, the...

Unworthy

NOT FOR his distinguished legislative record—he practically had none—was Benigno S. Aquino III elected to the Philippine Presidency in 2010, but for his presumed libertarian and human rights heritage. Benigno Aquino Jr. was an authentic hero for daring to return home in 1983 despite the certainty of either arrest or...

Power vs freedom

FREEDOM OF information, an issue that constitutes a critical test for any nation with any pretension to democracy, has hung unresolved hereabouts all these years. I’m not surprised really, although I must confess being myself persuaded, once Noynoy Aquino became president, to suspend disbelief about a law guaranteeing that...

Nuisance candidates all

THE PHILIPPINE media were having a field day last week at the expense of the usual batch of so-called "nuisance candidates" for various posts including the Senate who, every election period, declare their intention to run for office. Among the subjects of their ridicule were: someone who wanted the...

The president’s love life

QUESTIONS ABOUT the news trade, as practiced both universally and in this country, are put to me quite often—usually by email and by students and now and then by practitioners themselves. I have decided to reproduce in this column some of the exchanges provoked by them (sometimes re-edited, in...

Jailing Peter for John

SENATOR EDGARDO J. Angara was asking what he thought was a rhetorical question last week as the Supreme Court was about to issue a temporary restraining order stopping for 120 days the implementation of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 (RA 10175), of which he was the principal sponsor...

Snipers from cyberspace (Updated)

THE DEBATE on how to deal with cyber-crime has given rise to comparisons between unseen and unnamed news-media sources and subjects on the one hand and arbitrary and untraceable operators on the other. Not only are the comparisons ignorant, they are perversely false. How at all can a dump...