A press freedom reader

This is, as she has said, an existential moment for journalism and for democracy. The country’s legislature has just passed a draconian anti-terrorism bill allowing the surveillance, warrantless arrest and detention of “suspicious” individuals. Human rights defenders say it will give authorities carte blanche to target those who criticise them online. A sudden surge in phantom Facebook accounts – created in the names of journalists and campaigners against the new law – has sparked fear that people could be held for faked material.

Even given this history, since Rodrigo Duterte’s election as president in 2016, the situation for the press has worsened. Under Duterte, the Philippine government has worked to suffocate the free press more than under any Philippine president since dictator Ferdinand Marcos. For years Duterte has been targeting Rappler, which has aggressively reported on the massive number of extrajudicial killings and other abuses in Duterte’s drug “war.” And for years he has singled out journalists for verbal abuse, and suggested that journalists could be assassinated.

Seven more criminal cases await in the wake of Monday’s verdict – ranging from alleged violations of the country’s Corporate Code to tax evasion – carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of “almost a hundred years” jail time, Ressa said. “I feel they want me to be scared.”

I remember young Maria as a sharp reporter who asked probing questions and threw herself into her work. We were both in the early stages of our career—I was reporting for a newspaper that had reopened after its closure by Marcos, and she was a correspondent for one of the first independent public-affairs programs to air on the newly liberated TV stations. It was a heady time. The press had been unshackled so we could roam the country and report freely on the struggles taking place for the soul of our new democracy. Like other Filipino journalists of that generation, we covered coups, bombings, assassinations, and street protests—the rocky transition from repressive dictatorship to flawed democracy.

I had faith that when it came to press freedom, the liberal tradition of Philippine courts would prevail. Moreover, our Bill of Rights has a provision akin to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This is one reason the Philippines until recently was known as having the freest press in Asia. Yet even by that standard, Maria was—and still is—in the words of a friend of ours, “Little Miss Sunshine,” an unfailing optimist and believer in democracy and the power of a free press. It was often difficult to convince her that some things were not possible.

On the eve of what would be a guilty verdict , Reynaldo Santos Jr slept very late.

Not because he was antsy over the promulgation on June 15, but because he was preparing drafts of the emails he needed to send out the next day for work. After all, he had only the morning off.

“Ganun ako ka-OC actually, kaya hindi ko matanggap ‘to dahil ganun ako ka-OC sa details,” Santos said over a phone interview with Rappler evening of Tuesday, June 16, when he had time to process his conviction over a cyber libel charge.

(I am that obssessive compulsive, that’s why I cannot accept this charge because I am that obssessive with details.)

While Ressa’s profile may have made her a convenient target, the Philippines’ culture of red baiting, harassment, intimidation, and even killings of journalists—along with what Ressa herself described as the “legal acrobatics” evident in the verdict against her—would no doubt have a chilling effect. Experts agree this could affect not just news organizations, but ordinary citizens seeking to express themselves online.

“The chills are felt by asking a simple question: ‘Who's next?’" said Danilo Arao, an associate professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s journalism department, adding that the chill may already be felt in the country’s current lack of in-depth criticism of government policies and programs.

“Democracy is already dead,” the 37-year-old editor-in-chief of Development Media Group (DMG) told Reuters from a location he asked to keep secret.

“They blocked media, restrict media agencies, banned news, punish journalists. Media is the lifeblood of democracy in the country. Without media, how can democracy survive?”

“On March 30, around half past nine in the evening, ten men in plain clothes came to my home in Mandalay and said they had to interrogate me,” said Nay Lin, editor of the online publication Voice of Myanmar (VOM). When Nay Lin followed the men, it turned out that the police were investigating him under the anti-terror law. The accusation: Nay Lin had interviewed the spokesman for the rebel group Arakan Army (AA) in Rakhine, which had recently been declared a “terrorist organization” by the government. The maximum sentence for alleged support of the AA: life imprisonment.

Nay Lin spent ten days in prison, partly in solitary confinement. Then the charges were dropped. It was clear that this had been done in order to intimidate him – and with success: “My colleagues are intimidated. Some have stopped working for VOM. And one of our media partners stopped exchanging content with us, so we lost revenue.”

In its brief reasons accompanying the bill, the Timor-Leste Justice Department advances the grotesque justification for the bill as conferring “dignity” against offences which flow from the violation of – ill defined ­– rights to “honour, good name and reputation”. The reasoning apparently is that since, under Section 36 of the Constitution, everyone has the right to honour, good name and reputation, a law criminalising “offences” against these will confer “criminal dignity” on those entitled to such rights.

Aside from the arrests, the Ministry of Information and Communications on May 28 issued a one-month publishing ban on the website of Phu nu Online over its series alleging a construction company was damaging the environment.

John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said the arrests and suspension could be a sign that authorities are preparing for the 13th National Party Congress due to take place next year.

“The media is under assault,” Sifton told VOA, adding that the harassment of activists and critics, even months ahead of the congress, was typical.

Indonesian authorities should immediately release journalist Diantara Putra Sumedi and stop legal proceedings against him, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Police in Kotabaru, South Kalimantan province, have held Diantara in detention since May 4, in response to a criminal defamation complaint filed against him, according to news reports .

The complaint was filed by a person identified as Sukirman, who claims to be a representative of the Dayak ethnic group, who alleged that Diantara, a blogger and former editor-in-chief of the Banjar Hits news website, misquoted him in a November 2019 article, according to those reports.