In Medias Res Archives | Page 17 of 26

Martial law reborn

THE CYBERCRIME Prevention Act of 2012 (RA 10175) has not only united those who have a Facebook or Twitter account, who have a blog or website, who access chat rooms or who use email to communicate in opposing the Act as a grave threat to free expression. It has...

Drawings as theater

AS A boy I read everything I could get my hands on, fish wrap included. But, truth to tell, I found home reading either unexciting (the daily Times or Chronicle) or strenuous (the weekly Free Press). Anyway, I read it all, as I did all else available, partly out...

Martial Law in Philippine cyberspace

Today, the resistance to the Cybercrime Prevention Act gains ground with the "Petition for Certiorari, Prohibition, and Injunction..." filed by media groups with the Supreme Court. The Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility (CMFR) is a signatory, asking the High Court "to annul and/or restrain the implementation" of the...

Worst assault on free expression since 1972

THE CYBERCRIME Prevention Act of 2012 is the worst assault on free expression since Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law 40 years ago if only for its potential to affect the 26 to 30 million Filipinos, including journalists, who regularly access the Internet to upload information through personal blogs...

Redefining journalism

IT HAS not occurred to me to look at certain changes in my trade as closely as I do now. It’s probably because the changes have been made arbitrarily and little affect my own medium—print. For now, at any rate, I wish to deal with a wide-ranging point raised with...

Anomaly’s child

MUCH OF the post-2010 expectations of the press and media community critical of the Arroyo administration’s antagonism to free expression and press freedom have not been realized during the Aquino III administration. Neither institutional transparency—the bureaucracy’s sustained commitment to the right to information as State policy—nor institutionalized openness, or the...

Sanctioning media

The sensitive subject of sanctions against the media has been raised with me through questions that, not unlike in a school exam, calls for straight answers. The questions have come in fact from journalism students, provoked by an actual case—that involving the brothers Tulfo, practitioners all, who closed ranks...

So far, so good!

The movie, "Innocence of Muslims", its trailer on YouTube, and the protests, the angry riots, and violent attacks against US and their embassies in Arab countries, including the killing of a US ambassador, should not be seen simply as reflecting one issue. The geo-political aspects reflected by the angry...

Fundamentalist v. Fundamentalist

NOT THE proper responses to films one doesn’t like are the bombing and burning of embassies and the killing of ambassadors. But the former at least has become, in certain countries, the preferred expression of outrage against the media. The violence the film "Innocence of Muslims" has provoked, which has...

Journalism misgivings

THE NEWS profession used to be a fairly clear path. Since I began walking it nearly a half-century ago, it didn’t pose any problems I could not sort out for myself. Now it’s no longer such an easy walk; it has become so laid with traps one can no...