In Medias Res Archives | Page 25 of 26

Making up the rules

ONE OF the least enlightening and least knowledgeable of the comments the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s publication last March 13 of the photographs of Corona trial defense witness Demetrio Vicente provoked was the claim that the media don’t have ethical and professional rules; “they just make them up as...

Making up for chances lost forever (Updated)

THE MOMENT we gripped hands Roland Simbulan and I were brought back to the same occasion. There, many months earlier, with our better halves, namesakes as happens—his own Chit Estella and my own Chit Roces—we had sat at lunch in one kindred circle with other friends in the home of...

Observing the improbable change in Burma

PHILIPPINE MEDIA gave the visit of Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario to Rangoon. But so much more has been left out of the dramatic changes taking place in Burma, the improbable and startling shift in the outlook and orientation of the country’s leadership.

Notes on the education of journalists (UPDATED)

JOURNALISM COURSES had been taught in University of the Philippines (UP) and other schools, among them the University of Santo Tomas (UST), since after the Second World War. In UP, journalism courses were, in the 1950s and the early 1960s, offered in the Department of English and taught by...

A moral crucible

CHIEF JUSTICE Renato Corona has announced, although not without his usual hemming and hawing, that he will testify at his own impeachment trial. Anyway, if and when he does testify, that will be the day. On the stand, Corona cannot expect to be taken at his word, as has been...

Women in media

THE ROLE of women journalists in the Martial Law period remains unique and stand apart from the stories of other women in the country and those of women journalists in other parts of the world who suffered exile and isolation, imprisonment and death for the cause of freedom and...

More of the same?

BURMA, THE bad boy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is supposedly easing restrictions on, among others, the press and the political opposition, and the Western funding agencies are rushing into the democratization breach.

A spectacle within a spectacle (Updated)

QUITE OBVIOUSLY, impeachment is not strictly lawyers’ business. If the defense lawyers and some members of the court try, as in fact they do, to circumscribe it within legalities, they are out of order, because they’re shutting out the whole nation, which, for all its lay-mindedness, is still the...

Media in Southeast Asia

THE LANDSCAPE of Southeast Asia presents a diversity of political and governmental systems, of religions and faiths, culture and custom, history and society. Some experts have said that nothing really holds Southeast Asia together. Geography has changed, and land bridges no longer bind the islands and archipelagos to the...

Decriminalizing libel Towards true self-regulation

THE CONVICTION for libel in 2007 of Davao broadcaster Alexander Adonis, for which he was sentenced to a prison term of two years to four years and six months, has been declared incompatible by the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) with the International Covenant on Civil and...