There is one story from this year that I think best illustrates what we do at the website, which incidentally marks its 20th year this month.
As a Manila court was set to promulgate the verdict on the cyber libel case against Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former Rappler researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. in June, we were made to understand that it would be best to not highlight the story.
It would not do to have Ressa, among the founders of the news website that has been under constant attack from the Duterte administration, become the face of the fight for press freedom.
We felt, though, that the cyberlibel case is an important story and that the verdict could have an effect on us and other online news outfits.
And so this story in a series where you will read about her but not see her face:
Sometimes, if we know we can’t write about a person or company, we’ll write around them and take a look at the sector they’re moving in instead, trusting the reader to draw their own conclusions.
It is a constant test to see how far we can push the envelope and sometimes a demonstration on how hard the envelope can push back.
Sometimes it’s in the form of a formal letter from a lawmaker with an informal commentary on farts*, sometimes it’s a Facebook message from out of the blue from a minor official not very subtly hinting he would get me in trouble with our owner. Other times are too dark to talk about openly.
We are not the bravest, I will accept, but I disagree that we are the most timid.
We have been referred to as the Red Star and as a bunch of “rogue millennials” for diverging from — at time directly clashing with — how the legacy newspaper does things.
We have made a conscious decision, for example, for our reporting to include if not highlight the points of view of non-elite sources**.
We are also biased towards basic freedoms like of speech, of association, and of the press and biased against letting things go when they don’t make sense.***
These things, more than actual animosity towards the president, is why we view his policy decisions with skeptical eyes.
But progressive as we may like to think we are, we cannot abandon the basic principles of journalism. We cannot, for example, state as fact an assertion that we have not been able to verify.
We can frame a story a certain way and include as much context as we can but cannot exclude the government narrative.
We are constrained by the rules of the institution that we move in, an institution that we hope (possibly incorrectly) will help society decide where it wants to go (hopefully and just as possibly incorrectly to a better place).
Breaking those rules, regardless of what other set of rules everybody else is playing by, is not a line we can come back from after crossing. Nor can we likely afford the host of legal problems that will bring.
Maybe that earns us getting called out, as earlier this week, for our “spineless journalism” but at the end of the day, it will still have been journalism.
There are days when doing even just that is brave enough.
*Truly, this moment was among the biggest disappointments I have ever had in someone I covered while was still young and idealistic because he had threatened us with a libel case before segueing into the bit about farts.
** Sort of related is writing for non-elite readers, like this story in Filipino about the recession that basically revolves around the question “so... anong paki natin diyan?”
*** Like, for example, the president’s statement that he would be the first to try the experimental COVID-19 vaccine from Russia and the Palace suddenly making the whole exercise of holding clinical trials about when he would be vaccinated.
The actual story is that the trials have been scheduled even if the government doesn’t know enough about ‘Sputnik V’ yet.