LuisTeodoro.com

JOURNALISTS’ and media advocacy groups marked World Press Freedom Day on May 3 (yesterday in Manila) this year as in the past years. But as if by agreement, they avoided the word “celebrated,” echoing a National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) statement marking the occasion in 2010 that “there is nothing to celebrate,” among other reasons because 32 journalists and media workers had been killed on November 23, 2009 in Maguindanao in what is now known as the Ampatuan Massacre.

NUJP did hold its usual “media jam” this year, during which, however, the gaiety was in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the uncertainties of the decade, specially the past two and a half years.

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IN THE 1960s the University of the Philippines’ being supposedly “godless” and its students’ being agnostics if not atheists was common lore among middle-class families thinking of where to send their children to college.

Among the reasons could have been UP’s being a secular institution rather than a religious one, and the claim, made through the media by adherents of “godly” education, alleging the infestation of the philosophy department of its then College of Liberal Arts with atheists, who were also accused of being communists.

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THE New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has once again ranked the Philippines third in its 2012 Impunity Index. The Index ranks countries all over the world on the basis of the level of impunity, measured as a ratio to population, of the killers of journalists and media workers in the previous year.

Occupying the number one place in the 2012 Index — i.e., it has the most number of journalists killed for which the perpetrators have not been punished — is Iraq. In second place is Somalia, followed by the Philippines at number three. Behind the Philippines in fourth place is Sri Lanka. In fifth place is Colombia, followed by Nepal in sixth, and Afghanistan in seventh.

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IF THE United States, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared this week in an address at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, is not provoking conflict with capitalist China, it has an odd way of showing it.

As the US spokesperson on global affairs — which from Afghanistan to Zanzibar the US thinks are ITS affairs whatever the local inhabitants may think — Clinton herself has repeatedly criticized China for censoring the Internet, suppressing criticism of the government and its policies, and imprisoning dissenters.

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FILIPINOS have a love-hate relationship with their countrymen in other climes. It’s a relationship defined by class boundaries, in that most Filipinos love them while some don’t, and even despise them.

Those professionals and middle class folk — including, perhaps especially, journalists still with enough brains to think about such matters — who’ve either decided to stick it out in this country despite the political instability, economic stagnation, and the chaos of daily existence; or who have no choice but to stay, are more likely to thumb their noses at their fellow professionals who’re residents or citizens in other countries.

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YOU know what they say about protesting too much, but that’s what the Aquino government has been doing since student activists coined the term “Noynoying” to mean “not doing anything despite the need to do something.”

Malacanang has mobilized its huge stable of photo- and videographers to disprove the suspicion that’s rapidly morphing into a conclusion, and already widespread long before the youth group Anakbayan coined the term, that Benigno Aquino III is more preoccupied with dating rather than assessing typhoon damage, or with sampling Manila night life rather than defusing a hostage crisis — and very recently, with sleeping till eleven a.m. after a night of carousing rather than looking into how his government can relieve Filipinos from the inflationary impact of the oil companies’ jacking up pump prices.

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THE BATTLE over the impeachment of Renato Corona is being fought between the camp of Benigno Aquino III and that of Renato Corona, who is no less a politician than, say, your garden-variety congressman. Corona meets all the qualifications except one: he has never been elected, and, judging from his low approval rating, is probably unelectable.

Justice Secretary Leila de Lima nevertheless said Renato Corona was “acting like a politician,” implying thereby that he isn’t one, and declaring that, therefore, it was “unbecoming” of him to bring his case to the media by giving no less than six interviews in some of the most popular radio and TV news and public affairs programs.

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IN 1633, the Inquisition declared Galileo guilty of writing a heretical book in which he supposedly favored the Copernican theory that the Sun rather than the Earth was at the center of the (then known) universe. The Catholic Church eventually admitted that he might have been right, it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun rather than the other way around — but it did so only in 1983, or 350 years after Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for life.

Considering how much Miriam Defensor-Santiago thinks the world of herself, it might take her that long to discover that she’s neither the Sun nor the center of the universe. Relentlessly aware of her being a lawyer and a former professor of law, of having been a judge, and now a “senator-judge” who’s on her way to the World Court, Defensor-Santiago only rarely fails to remind everyone of her titles and alleged
accomplishments.

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SPEAKING during the commemoration of the 26th anniversary of the uprising at Quezon City’s Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) in 1986 that led to the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos, Benigno Aquino III urged Filipinos to do something about the judiciary, which he described as “one of the wrongs committed in the past” that has to be corrected.

In the same speech Mr. Aquino also claimed that the martial law period — the 14 years from September 1972 to February 1986 during which the country was in the grip of the Marcos dictatorship — happened because Filipinos chose to be silent. Working for reforms, Mr. Aquino also said, is the duty of every Filipino, not just of Ninoy and Cory Aquino.

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DESPITE its failure to deliver on its promises, some Filipinos still hail the 1986 EDSA uprising as a model of how peacefully change can be achieved.

The shift in Thailand from military rule to democracy in 1992, and the fall from power of Indonesia’s Suharto in 1998, for example, were supposedly among the political upheavals the event inspired. Changes in other parts of Asia and in Eastern Europe have similarly been credited to the demonstration effect of Philippine People Power, or EDSA 1986.

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