67. Frenchie Mae Cumpio to finally speak
The community journalist takes the stand nearly five years since her arrest
Welcome back to Slow News Days, a hopefully weekly newsletter on journalism and journalism-adjacent topics in the Philippines.
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Frenchie Mae Cumpio, a community journalist who has been detained in Leyte since 2020 on questionable terror-related cases, will finally get to start telling her story in court on Monday, November 11.
“Cumpio’s plight reflects the broader struggle of Filipino journalists working under challenging and often hostile conditions to uphold their commitment to truth and justice,” AlterMidya People’s Alternative Media Network said of her case in a statement commemorating the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists.
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The Eastern Vista news portal where Cumpio was editor-in-chief is a member of the AlterMidya network and has been dormant since 2020, a direct effect of her arrest and proof of how cases against community journalists weaken press freedom.
UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan, the first foreign visitor Cumpio was allowed to meet, said in February that the government should “look into those cases, review the case and dismiss the charges. Or, bring them to trial rapidly with full due process so that it can be decided whether or not they are guilty.”
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Nine months since Khan’s visit, that has not happened, but Cumpio’s chance to testify on Monday brings hope that she — as well as church worker Marielle Domequil and human rights defender Alexander Abinguna who are facing the cases with her — will be freed soon.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists made a similar call for the government to drop the cases, pointing out in a statement that she is only getting the chance to speak “after languishing in jail for nearly five years,” which, it said is in itself a “disgraceful travesty of justice.”
Reporters Without Borders, meanwhile, called for the dropping of the charges, saying Cumpio “who reported on abuses committed by the military, is obviously targeted by a strategy that seeks to deter all Filipino journalists from investigating taboo topics.”
“Her case highlights the disturbing ‘red-tagging’ practice in the Philippines, used to label journalists as ‘subversive’ or even ‘terrorists’ when they cover issues deemed sensitive by the government,” RSF also said.
Unfortunately, not even the Presidential Task Force on Media Security can help itself from engaging in the practice, with its head at the time saying in January that Cumpio was in detention “for her active role in the local terrorist groups of the communists,” an accusation that has not been proven in court.
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Inspired (and maybe a little shamed) to give this newsletter another whirl by media watchers Press on Standby PH and Medyo Media PH, who have the advantage of being younger than me by at least a decade and of having the energy of youth.
US-based Prinz Magtulis has a data story on why it feels like more of the same people are running for office in the Philippines. It feels that way because it is true and with nice visuals: Smaller and smaller election field.
Everybody’s idol Krixia Subingsubing was in the US to cover the elections there, and sends back a familiar dispatch (doubly so for her since she covered the Robredo campaign in 2022): Fil-Ams target of information manipulation in US polls
A related (and also familiar) story from Mother Jones: The Oligarch Election: American billionaires have long placed their thumbs on the scale of democracy—but never like this.
This is a plug for an upcoming Photojournalists’ Center of the Philippines seminar, but is also a situationer on the particular plight of visual journalists: Nobody wants to be a photojournalist anymore
Finally, an alternative narrative to the one that mainstream media has been telling of violence involving fans of an Israeli football club in Amsterdam: Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chant racist slogans upon return to Israel from Amsterdam
I have been binging the Citations Needed media criticism podcast and, to borrow a term from it, the way media has been covering these things (things like, for example, the bloody and brutal collective punishment being conducted in Gaza) — and more broadly, how most of the world has been responding to them— has been “jokerfying.”