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 that, like collective prayer, collective hope collects a self-fulfilling force.
A show will be mounted reviving the bill in the next congress. But that’s all it will be, all it has always been—a show. For how can a bill probably stillborn in the first place be revived? Furthermore, how can Congress be expected to pass a law that compels keepers of public information to release to the news media any piece of it they ask for when such an arrangement would also have its members keep fewer secrets?
Still, the show must go on—to dissimulate a most shameful fraudulence, a fraudulence rooted in an addiction to power. As I have said here,
[T]he issue is a natural battleground between power and freedom; between those who, for their wealth, influence, and stature, deserve only to be watched, the likes of whom Congress precisely crawls with, and, opposite them, the press, the constitutionally assigned watchdog on them.[1]
Anyway, as I have said, I have decided to stop playing along, the decisive disappointment delivered by President Aquino himself, who also, ironically, had persuaded me to further suspend my disbelief in the Freedom of Information Bill ever passing. As I have gone on to write,
After all, he promised it, and he seems a man of his word—indeed, he tends to take his own word beyond its intrinsic, reasonable worth, not unlike Charlie Brown, who believes sincerity alone will carry him to every victory: “How could we lose when we were so sincere.”
Well, I got him wrong—wrong on the precise intervention that could reinforce his principal avowal. Imagine how far his war on corruption can carry with a law punishing the withholding of [public] information.. . . At any rate, he has said nothing reassuring about the [proposed] law, and he has no excuse.
Now, even Nepomuceno Malaluan, one of the most sanguine and tireless and coolest shepherds of the proposed law, has been driven to outrage at the way the last hearing went. In a report sent out the same day of the last hearing (Nov. 13), after its adjournment, Malaluan, a lawyer at the Institute for Freedom of Information and the Right-to-Know-Right-Now! Coalition, declared in capital letters that his pet bill had suffered “battery, assault, and murder.” He went on to point out an apparent conspiracy within the committee to drag out the bill, citing the leadership of its chairman, Ben Evardone.
I’d say it was a power-class conspiracy to torture the bill by filibustering and other shameless forms of obstructionism under the ring-leadership of someone who had been a journalist himself before he turned anti-press-freedom politician.
The Freedom of Information Bill, Malaluan conceded, “is dead in the 15th Congress.” Do I detect here some remaining hope carrying over to the 16th Congress?
I’d say that the bill is dead period, and that anything still seen floating around is a ghost or an impostor.
[1]“Unabridgeable freedom,” In Medias Res/Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, posted November 12, 2012.
Much ado about something that will never happen. Lipservice at it’s finest. Now, let’s focus on cyber libel.