FACING CENSORSHIP
By Joel Pablo Salud
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| Source: Rappler |
Some may think that, for a real journalist, hell is a dark, damp prison or the cold metal slab of a mortician’s table. This may be true to a certain extent. You can ask any who had come face to face with the corrupt, malignant conditions of our penal system.
However, there is much more to an actual hell for a working journalist than meets the eye. I would assume that hell is where censorship, in whatever shape or form, lives and breathes like behemoths lying in wait to devour the messenger. Either by visible restraints or invisible ones makes no real difference.
When we hear the word “censorship,” almost immediately we see images of Nazi book burnings. During Marcos’ martial law, censorship came in the form of the closure of news outlets and the arrests of editors, poets, and journalists.
The recent coup in Myanmar saw the illegal seizure of roughly 100 journalists with 46 remaining in custody today, according to Human Rights Watch. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said “Myanmar's rulers had effectively criminalized independent journalism”.
As early as Dec. 2020, CPJ reports that the number of journalists jailed worldwide has reached record figures, with retaliatory killings of journalists doubling as of last count. Back home, CPJ pegs the number of journalists murdered since 1992 at close to 100, with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s administration posting the highest number of those killed.
Does this mean that Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s regime is not guilty of censorship, as one national artist claims? “No writer is in jail,” he said in describing this regime. “There is no censorship. Duterte hasn’t closed a single newspaper or radio station.”
The current regime’s brand of censorship may be a far cry from the censorship imposed by Myanmar’s military or Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers so far as the numbers are concerned. But may I ask: how many is one too many?
Twenty journalists have been murdered since Duterte took power based on the latest count of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines. Twenty-three-year-old Frenchie Mae Cumpio remains in jail under trumped-up charges for being a member of the alternative media.
To this very day, poet, fiction writer, and playwright Amanda Echanis, daughter to slain activist Randy Echanis, languishes at the Cagayan Provincial Jail together with her one-month-old child, Randall Emmanuel, after her arrest on Dec. 2020. She was one of 3,790 activists charged under the current regime. Journalist Lady Ann Salem of Manila Today was also arrested and jailed around the same time and released in early 2021.
Some journalists have allegedly been retrenched under dubious circumstances, with ABS-CBN Network getting the brunt of this regime’s antagonism. Duterte himself, on numerous occasions, had admitted that he was behind the refusal of Congress to grant the network its franchise.
In Sept. 2021, the Kalinga State University and the Isabela State University have purged from their libraries all books which even remotely suggested of communist leanings. Most everyone believes this is in line with the government’s anti-communist campaign.
Maria Ressa, the Nobel’s newest laureate for Peace, had been arrested twice. Today, Ressa and Rappler continue to face several charges, to say little of the continuing harassment of Rappler’s reporters and correspondents who’ve have been barred from entering the Palace grounds.
This is where fellow columnist John Nery hit the mark when he called out the aforementioned national artist for his false claims: “To be so out of touch with what’s actually happening on the ground—that would be a fatal flaw in any writer”.
However much one tries to exonerate the present regime from its duties to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, one thing stands clear: the spread of “fake” news is the new censorship.
The current administration has milked this for all it’s worth since it assumed power in 2016, shaking each and every day the confidence of the public against its journalists and writers.
Yet, after all’s said and done on the matter of whether Filipinos are being censored or not, it’s what is not being said that should count: that the killings of journalists, topped with the closure of ABS-CBN, and the impunity this current regime enjoys, have sent a crippling chill into newsrooms all over the country.
Some writers have resorted to self-censorship in order to stave off any further harassment from the State and its paid trolls. Others have simply given up on the pressure and threw their lot with the creators of “fake” news.
Bleak as this may seem, there are journalists who continue to defy the chill of persecution by choosing to step into the line of fire, that place of honor once proposed by anti-Marcos student activist Lean Alejandro who himself was a writer. He was gunned down in a car reportedly by elements of the military on Sept. 19, 1987.
These are the same journalists who understood Henry Grunwald’s words: “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air”.
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Joel Pablo Salud is a known writer in both Opinion and in Creative Writing. His works were featured in the Philippines Free Press, and in Philippines Graphic (formerly “Philippine Graphic”) where he served as Editor. The essay was first published online by San Anselmo Press.
His new book, "In the Line of Fire", a collection of his lectures, will be released this year by San Anselmo Press.