We will not surrender our freedomsToday, Independence Day, we renew our pledge to serve the people, to continue speaking truth to power, and to guard and defend freedom of the press and of expression from all threats.Read More Covering the PandemicRead more Covering the CoViD-19 Pandemic Prickly points of practice HERE, AGAIN, are discussions of points raised with me now and then by students of journalism as well as practitioners and outsiders who have to deal with them—news subjects and sources chiefly. Merely essential, not to mention unilateral, these discussions can surely use much further carrying on. Anyway, for... Saving ethics—from the market Second and last part THE ATTITUDE has carried over to this day such that very few media companies turn a profit and the media fraternity has remained a mixed collection of bona fide journalists, ex-journalists, para-journalists, and pseudo-journalists; in fact it is the proper practitioners in the mix who seem... Saving ethics* WHEN I started as a newspaperman, in the mid-1960s, the profession was not so haunted by ethics as it is now, and that’s because rarely, if at all, did any journalist find himself in a situation where his ethics was tested. "Envelopmental journalism," the pun on "developmental journalism" that... An underhanded law (Updated) THE PRESIDENT’S remark that proper news practitioners should have no reason to worry if the Right of Reply Law passes is not only patronizing but also inversely misleading. It is precisely the fair-minded and self-respecting, the rightly skeptical and dogged, among the journalists whom the law penalizes—those resistant to... A tale of two massacres (Updated) EXACTLY THREE years ago today a convoy was hijacked in a town in Maguindanao province and forced off the road to a pre-dug mass grave about two kilometers away. That stopped a woman from filing for her husband a certificate of candidacy that would challenge the dynastic domination of... 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... 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... 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... 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... 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... « Previous1234…6Next »
