Year of the pig January 2, 2007
OVER the weekend i got flooded with text and calls from my lawyer friends offering me their services pro bono and prodigally should I need them in my "case." The reason for this was an item that appeared on page 3 of the Inquirer on Friday. It was titled "Media groups sue Mike Arroyo over libel suits."
The third paragraph read: "The class suit argues that the libel suits have not only caused the respondents sleepless nights; they also have a chilling effect on press freedom," said the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, one of the groups that instigated the suit. Others involved are the Center for Freedom and Responsibility and the Daily Tribune, as well as 36 print journalists, including Philippine Daily Inquirer columnists Ramon Tulfo and Conrado de Quiros."
That is quite misleading, and has misled my friends into thinking I am one of the journalists the First Gentleman--a humongous insult to "first," "gentle" and "man"--has filed libel suits against. I am not, to my great dismay. I did say in a column some time ago that I felt discriminated against, being left out of the illustrious group of people who have earned the fellow's ire. There are now a whopping 43 of them, including my good friends Billy Esposo, Marites Vitug and Ellen Tordesillas.
Why they have not included me in the list, well, I understand that the First Gentleman's lawyer told a talk show on TV--friends told me about it--that in my case the things I have been saying are well within the law! I had a good laugh over that at the expense of my friends--who seemed to take a rather violent exception to the thought.
I can only thank my lawyer-friends for their gesture (and non-lawyer-friends for their expressions of sympathy and solidarity) and I beg them to stick around, I may yet have need to impose on them in the future.
For those who do not know it yet, and by way of background, over the past months Mike Arroyo has been filing libel charges against journalists for calling him various things, from being arrogant to being a crook. That has no precedent in history. I do not recall any presidential spouse--or mistress--filing a libel case against these many journalists, if at all. Well, now Arroyo's victims are fighting back. Last Friday, with the aid of lawyer Harry Roque, they filed a countersuit against Arroyo citing abuse of power.
I am, of course, all for it and have been helping out in it. I am one of the endorsers of the class suit, which was probably what caused the confusion. From where I stand though, I don't know why Arroyo shouldn't just be charged with abuse of the English language, if not of sanity. What does libel mean but that one is lying? What does to charge people with libel mean but to say that they are liars? Mike Arroyo calling other people liars? That isn't just the pot calling the kettle black, that is the vulture calling the eagle coward. Never mind if the journalists were right or wrong to call Arroyo a crook, mind only if he or his wife and their friends have any capacity to tell truth from lie.
You want to charge someone with lying, charge the person who vowed solemnly she would not run again but did. You want to charge someone with lying, charge the person who said she welcomed an impeachment trial to prove her innocence but paid off the "tongressmen" to kill the impeachment bids. Indeed, you want to charge someone with lying, charge that father of all liars who said he was here all the time; it was just that people, including the Foreign Affairs Department and the Singapore Immigration, who swore he had fled abroad; and that the entire opposition that was hunting him down to answer for his crime could not see where he was.
Arroyo's lawyers say he has every right to file libel charges against people who criticize him because he is not a public official, he is a private citizen. What can I say? I rest my case about their ability to tell truth from lie. No, I rest my case about their ability to tell the truth.
The easiest refutation of that is what he and his wife did at the height of the "Hello Garci" scandal in 2005. If Arroyo was just a private citizen whose existence had nothing to do with government, why did he go on "voluntary exile" after being accused of influence-peddling and receiving kickbacks from an illegal numbers racket, presumably so that his wife could "go on with her job?" If he was just a private citizen whose prodigious weight weighed little on government, why did GMA announce his departure in a major speech before businessmen, claiming she was making a terrible "sacrifice" by letting him go? That was an hour before Susan Roces was to appear at Club Filipino, and GMA's bad acting so incensed Roces she unloaded that "I looked you in the eye and saw no contrition there" tirade at her. Of course, sending the First Gentleman--that phrase really burns the tongue--to San Francisco was as much a punishment for him as forcing Dracula to drink blood, but that is another story.
The NUJP and the filers of the class suit themselves have a point when they say Arroyo's libel suits against journalists screw press freedom. By themselves, those suits already constitute a threat to it. But taken in conjunction with the unrelenting decimation of journalists in the provinces, they are an effort to scuttle that freedom entirely. Those are two sides of the same coin: The killing of critics outside of Metro Manila and the muzzling of critics inside it. It means to do to the media what EO 464 did to public officials, which is to make them see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
This year may be the year of the pig, but we would do very well to see that the swine do not prosper.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=41199
The third paragraph read: "The class suit argues that the libel suits have not only caused the respondents sleepless nights; they also have a chilling effect on press freedom," said the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, one of the groups that instigated the suit. Others involved are the Center for Freedom and Responsibility and the Daily Tribune, as well as 36 print journalists, including Philippine Daily Inquirer columnists Ramon Tulfo and Conrado de Quiros."
That is quite misleading, and has misled my friends into thinking I am one of the journalists the First Gentleman--a humongous insult to "first," "gentle" and "man"--has filed libel suits against. I am not, to my great dismay. I did say in a column some time ago that I felt discriminated against, being left out of the illustrious group of people who have earned the fellow's ire. There are now a whopping 43 of them, including my good friends Billy Esposo, Marites Vitug and Ellen Tordesillas.
Why they have not included me in the list, well, I understand that the First Gentleman's lawyer told a talk show on TV--friends told me about it--that in my case the things I have been saying are well within the law! I had a good laugh over that at the expense of my friends--who seemed to take a rather violent exception to the thought.
I can only thank my lawyer-friends for their gesture (and non-lawyer-friends for their expressions of sympathy and solidarity) and I beg them to stick around, I may yet have need to impose on them in the future.
For those who do not know it yet, and by way of background, over the past months Mike Arroyo has been filing libel charges against journalists for calling him various things, from being arrogant to being a crook. That has no precedent in history. I do not recall any presidential spouse--or mistress--filing a libel case against these many journalists, if at all. Well, now Arroyo's victims are fighting back. Last Friday, with the aid of lawyer Harry Roque, they filed a countersuit against Arroyo citing abuse of power.
I am, of course, all for it and have been helping out in it. I am one of the endorsers of the class suit, which was probably what caused the confusion. From where I stand though, I don't know why Arroyo shouldn't just be charged with abuse of the English language, if not of sanity. What does libel mean but that one is lying? What does to charge people with libel mean but to say that they are liars? Mike Arroyo calling other people liars? That isn't just the pot calling the kettle black, that is the vulture calling the eagle coward. Never mind if the journalists were right or wrong to call Arroyo a crook, mind only if he or his wife and their friends have any capacity to tell truth from lie.
You want to charge someone with lying, charge the person who vowed solemnly she would not run again but did. You want to charge someone with lying, charge the person who said she welcomed an impeachment trial to prove her innocence but paid off the "tongressmen" to kill the impeachment bids. Indeed, you want to charge someone with lying, charge that father of all liars who said he was here all the time; it was just that people, including the Foreign Affairs Department and the Singapore Immigration, who swore he had fled abroad; and that the entire opposition that was hunting him down to answer for his crime could not see where he was.
Arroyo's lawyers say he has every right to file libel charges against people who criticize him because he is not a public official, he is a private citizen. What can I say? I rest my case about their ability to tell truth from lie. No, I rest my case about their ability to tell the truth.
The easiest refutation of that is what he and his wife did at the height of the "Hello Garci" scandal in 2005. If Arroyo was just a private citizen whose existence had nothing to do with government, why did he go on "voluntary exile" after being accused of influence-peddling and receiving kickbacks from an illegal numbers racket, presumably so that his wife could "go on with her job?" If he was just a private citizen whose prodigious weight weighed little on government, why did GMA announce his departure in a major speech before businessmen, claiming she was making a terrible "sacrifice" by letting him go? That was an hour before Susan Roces was to appear at Club Filipino, and GMA's bad acting so incensed Roces she unloaded that "I looked you in the eye and saw no contrition there" tirade at her. Of course, sending the First Gentleman--that phrase really burns the tongue--to San Francisco was as much a punishment for him as forcing Dracula to drink blood, but that is another story.
The NUJP and the filers of the class suit themselves have a point when they say Arroyo's libel suits against journalists screw press freedom. By themselves, those suits already constitute a threat to it. But taken in conjunction with the unrelenting decimation of journalists in the provinces, they are an effort to scuttle that freedom entirely. Those are two sides of the same coin: The killing of critics outside of Metro Manila and the muzzling of critics inside it. It means to do to the media what EO 464 did to public officials, which is to make them see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
This year may be the year of the pig, but we would do very well to see that the swine do not prosper.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=41199
posted by dqfan06 @ 9:59 AM
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