Media divided over GMA’s mailed fist policy
Editorials and columns are sharply divided over the government’s hardline stance against opposition forces.
The Daily Tribune had been consistent in its anti-Arroyo stand. Reacting to the October 14 dispersal of the prayer rally in Mendiola, the paper’s October 16 editorial said: The “violent dispersal showed the conditions that would warrant the forcible eviction of Gloria from Malacañang several notches forward” (“Time ticks down for Gloria”).
The Philippine Star had an entirely contradicting editorial on the same day: “On a busy Friday (October 14), payday, traffic was again at a standstill in many parts of the city of Manila. Why? Because there was another anti-government rally in Mendiola. The usual people who surely hold no steady jobs and don’t go to school since they can afford to stage rallies daily were augmented by a small bunch of individuals suffering from acute lack of public attention.”
The editorial, entitled “Public nuisance,” added that what the protesters actually wanted was “maximum disruption of other people’s lives.” “Was their dispersal state repression?” Star asked. “Only if you think being a public nuisance is an inalienable right.”
The October 14 dispersal was a result of the government’s CPR policy which the Philippine Daily Inquirer had earlier described as “bad policy and worse politics” that would be most likely “add increasingly expensive fuel to fire.” The September 26 Inquirer editorial added: “It is neither calibrated nor preemptive, but only calculated intolerance” (“Dangerous ground”). The Philippines Free Press added its voice to the growing criticism of CPR in its October 8 editorial: “A government cannot react to challenges to its legitimacy by shaking a mailed fist at its enemies” (“The mailed fist”).
Columnists diss, support GMA
Conrado de Quiros of Inquirer gave a scathing opinion of the October 14 rally. He said that what happened was a “perfect symbol of what GMA has been trying to do, increasingly desperately, from killing the impeachment bid to banning protest rallies and preventing people–like Gen. Francisco Gudani and Col. Alexander Balutan–from testifying against her, which is not to disprove she cheated but to drown out all talk of it” (“Flood, p. A14).
He added: “Well, water is a purifying element, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the water GMA loosed last Friday soon turns into a flood tumbling in her direction.”
BusinessWorld’s Sonny Coloma took note of the CPR policy in his “Vector” column: “CPR is an amusing acronym for ‘calibrated preemptive response’ because as everyone knows, it also stands for cardiopulmonary respiration or ‘mouth-to-mouth’ resuscitation – an emergency procedure aimed at saving the life of a person. Is this some kind of a Freudian slip, an implicit admission that the present administration is resorting to emergency procedures to ensure its own survival?” (“Tightening noose,” October 7-8)
While a number of columnists criticized the way the police handled the October 14 rally, there wetr opinion-makers who denounced the anti-administration rallies, too.
Commenting on the police dispersal of a Mendiola rally before the October 14 incident, Emil P. Jurado of the Manila Standard Today in his “To The Point” column said the protesting militants and party-list solons were the ones who baited “the police to disperse them violently” for violating the “no-permit, no-rally law.” These people know that the rallies would be covered by the international media and soon enough, there would be international human rights groups looking at their complaints, he said (“‘Emergency’ talks fuel perception of panic,” October 13).
In his October 17 column, “Lowdown,” Manila Standard Today’s editor in chief Jojo Robles said that compared with the Mendiola Masscare in 1987 and the Valeriano de los Santos incident in 1967, the October 14 protesters were just all wet. The victims, he said, were the thousands of people who suffered from the traffic jams in Manila because of the rallies (“What a waste”).
For her part, Inquirer columnist Solita Collas-Monsod dismissed talks that the country would experience martial law again under the Arroyo presidency. In her “Get Real” column last October 15, Monsod traced the martial law rumors to four groups: “(a) those who are congenitally or ideologically prepared to ascribe to President Macapagal-Arroyo every possible evil that can be imagined; (b) those in media who get carried away in their quest for headlines and sales, and either tend to generate news instead of reporting it, or equivalently, report religiously every utterance of those in group (a); (c) those who take the printed or broadcast word as gospel, and don’t bother to check it out, panicking because of the excitement generated by groups (a) and (b); and (d) Justice Secretary Gonzalez, all by his lonesome” (“Who’s afraid of martial law?”)
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