We passed another anniversary over the weekend — of a House panel scrapping ABS-CBN’s application for a new franchise two years ago, a vote that has left the broadcaster off the air since then — but many of us were too tired and stressed to notice.
It has been a little hard to track dates, partly because most of Philippine media has been engaged in heavy drinking since May and because the hits seem to keep coming.
The Court of Appeals has denied the appeal of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. on a cyber libel conviction and, in upholding the conviction has increased their sentence.
It also ruled that the prescription period — the time you can be held liable — for cyber libel in the Philippines is 15 years and not 12 years, which is already longer than the one year period for regular libel.
It wasn’t surprising, given how Rappler has been faring in its legal and regulatory challenges, but was unexpected considering how libel complaints (and one for sedition) — by provincial governors, Cabinet officials and business magnates — have been withdrawn or thrown out as the Duterte presidency wound down business.
But even those small wins should be seen in the context of an even more challenging media landscape.
On June 29, a day before the end of Duterte’s term in office, it was found that the Securities and Exchange Commission had also decided to upholds its 2018 revocation of Rappler’s business registration over what it said was foreign ownership and not investment as Rappler had argued.
A week before that, the National Security Council and the National Telecommunications Commission acknowledged that government had blocked access to dozens of websites — including the websites of alternative news outfits Bulatlat and Pinoy Weekly — for alleged affiliation with or support for communist rebels.
These were allegations that the government did not substantiate and that were used to exercise a power it did not have, not even under the powerful Anti-Terrorism Act.
It has been a rough couple of weeks in what may be a rough six years but there are some reasons to hope.
Bulatlat has questioned the NTC’s blocking of its website in court for lack of factual or legal bases and is seeking damages of a whopping one peso (and, possibly, a priceless moral victory) for it.
It has meanwhile managed to stay online in the Philippines through a mirror site that government has not gotten around to blocking yet.
It sometimes feels like the sheer volume of the attacks on the media and of the attempts to harass and silence the public on social media and in the actual world is meant to tire us and to keep us too occupied to remember anniversaries like the ABS-CBN shutdown or to be angry about that.
They are arguably effective, but it could also be that missing anniversaries can lead to a recognition that we are all in this together and that each incident is part of a larger struggle for discourse and for democracy. And, more likely, more heavy drinking.
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Fuel prices have been rising since the start of the year and are being felt beyond the snarled Metro Manila streets. Philstar.com intern (and a journalist in her own right) Cristina Chi looks at how it has affected distance learning: As fuel costs soar, alternative learning teachers lose touch with students
As the threat of historical revisionism and a whitewashing of Martial Law grows, activists have been working overtime to keep records and news articles intact: Activist’s son puts materials on martial law era online, writes PDI’s Krixia Subingsubing
I write about red-tagging (or red-baiting, to most other people in the world) a lot, and the government often says that the practice doesn’t really cause any harm. It does, though, as Rappler’s Sherwin De Vera reports: In Ilocos, red-tagging victims battle emotional toll
And finally, more thoughts on journalism from award-winning journalist Shirish Kulkarni:
News should help their readers understand the world. Shirish encouraged journalists to think deeply about what they do. Does their work reinforce prevailing attitudes and structures or does it allow audiences to have a more comprehensive understanding of the issue at hand?