LuisTeodoro.com

THE SUPREME COURT has granted a petition for live coverage of the Ampatuan Massacre trial filed by media advocacy groups, TV networks, individual journalists, and academics from the University of the Philippines. But it has imposed conditions some media organizations are already describing as difficult if not impossible to meet. Some are already talking about filing a motion for Court reconsideration of some of the conditions. Others may decide not to cover the trial at all.

Among the guidelines media organizations find problematic is the Court’s requiring coverage of the entire proceedings each time there are hearings. The trial is currently being held twice a week (Wednesdays and Thursdays), and usually lasts from 9 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. Any TV or radio station that applies for and is granted permission (one of the conditions the Court is imposing) to cover the trial Branch 221 of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court is conducting would have to devote as much as five hours of coverage each time. No interruptions and commercial breaks are allowed except during recess periods, and no repeat broadcasts will be allowed on pain of the RTC’s withdrawing the station’s permit.

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IT was one of those statements that make no sense, but which some Catholic bishops are especially adept at making. Butuan Bishop Juan De Dios Pueblos said House Bill 1799, or the divorce bill, will lead to more immorality in Philippine society. The faithful should be trembling in their flip-flops. Immorality and the threat of hellfire are tales often told, though not always by an idiot.

The Philippines is now the only country in the world where there is no divorce. But assuming the Philippines finally catches up with the rest of the planet and Congress passes a divorce law, how would it lead to “more immorality”?

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“MILITARY intelligence” is the preferred oxymoron — the contradiction in terms most favored — by activists, human rights workers, and some academics. But that martial law classic may yet yield to these more recent gems, courtesy of the Bureau of Corrections: “living-out prisoner,” and the even more intriguing “sleeping-out prisoner.”

That there are indeed such prisoners in this earthly paradise of fish kills and illiterate congressmen who trivialize discussions on reproductive health and divorce seems to have caught a lot of bureaucrats, most of them from the Department of Justice, by surprise. And yet it’s one of the worst-kept secrets in this country, which means it’s hardly a secret at all: a convicted felon can still enjoy the amenities of home in his own made- to- order condo-hut without being locked up in a cell, and in some cases can even leave the prison compound for his Makati office to check his mail, or even to implement the terms of a murder contract.

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THANKS TO some priests and bishops of the Catholic Church, and with considerable help from the media, the debate on the consolidated Reproductive Health bill (House Bill 4244) pending in the House of Representatives is turning into a murky exercise that’s spreading more disinformation than enlightenment.

The episode in which perennial and number one House absentee Manny Pacquiao weighed in on the issue by announcing his opposition to the anti-RH bill demonstrated how far some bishops will go to stop the bill. The anti-RH bishops’ cynical manipulation of the boxer put their opposition on the front pages and the news programs, furthering their advocacy despite Pacquiao’s unfamiliarity with the issues and his embarrassing trouncing during the House debates. Although coached by the bishops, Pacquiao not only misquoted the Biblical injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply,” he also displayed an appalling though unsurprising ignorance of the bill’s intent and provisions unworthy of a member of the House of Representatives.

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COMMONWEALTH Avenue was once a dirt road which for some reason cut through the northern portion of the 500-hectare University of the Philippines campus. With only the occasional snake to worry about in the darkness, students would cross it to get to a bar called Butterfly. Commonwealth nowadays is an eight-lane highway serving the many subdivisions that have sprouted in what were once paddy fields, and leading to the House of Representatives, the Batasang Pambansa of martial law days.

Butterfly Bar has morphed into the 20- hectare UP Techno-hub, a joint undertaking of the University of the Philippines and property developer Ayala land. Devoted to developing information technology, the hub also has coffee shops, restaurants and bookstores to which the employees of hub-based companies like IBM could repair for coffee, meals, books, writing implements, newspapers and Web access. UP students and professors who visit the hub for those amenities risk life and limb every time they do so, the entrance to it being accessible by car or taxi from UP’s University Avenue only by crossing four east bound lanes of speeding vehicles, making a u-turn, and immediately cutting across four west-bound lanes down which trucks and busses barrel at breakneck speeds.

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IF THERE’S anything every reformer or revolutionary knows, it is how changing anything in this country is as difficult as pulling teeth — or how comparable it is to getting former Armed Forces comptrollers to explain their wealth, or to even remember where their wives have been.

Even revolutionaries, to whom convincing existing governments of the urgency of change isn’t as important as getting ordinary folk to join them, have a difficult time recruiting into social movements, no matter how valid, even the poorest of the poor and the most disempowered citizen. Filipinos may complain and whine about how bad things are, but doing something about it isn’t among their strengths.

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MEDIA ADVOCACY and journalists’ groups marked World Press Freedom Day last May 3 after a year (May 3, 2010- May 2, 2011) of continuing violence against the media.

Iraq and Afghanistan, where they faced the usual perils of being caught in the crossfire between warring groups, and in some cases targeted for abduction and assassination, were still major areas of conflict journalists had to cover, courtesy of the wars generated by US incursions in those countries. Five journalists were killed in Iraq in 2010, and two in Afghanistan. But the unrest in Egypt, Tunisia. Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and Libya also subjected journalists to the same perils of being killed, threatened, harassed or abducted. Four journalists have so far been killed in Libya, and two in Egypt. Several others were abducted in the crisis-ridden countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

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WITH the 21st century so young, the media are already calling the April 29 event “The wedding of the century.”

The British media’s focus on the wedding of William Windsor and Catherine Middleton is understandable. There may be a republican movement in Britain that detests the monarchy and wants it abolished, but there are enough monarchists out there to merit — if that’s the word — the kind of breathless attention such conservative papers as London’s Daily Mail have been paying to the run-up to, and the actual wedding of, two unremarkable people who, if the groom were not second in the line of succession to the British throne, the world would have no reason to notice.

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FORMER University of the Philippines law dean Raul Pangalangan says that the public call for an advertisers’ boycott of the TV5 program Willing Willie—and presumably some of the program’s sponsors’ withdrawing their ads–is “fraught with danger” for free expression. I submit that it is indeed fraught with danger, though not for free expression, but for its abuse.

Dean Pangalangan recalls that an advertisers’ boycott has been used before, for example in 1999, to intimidate the press. Reacting to press criticism, then President Joseph Estrada convinced his friends in the movie- making and -importing business not to advertise in, and to withdraw their ads from, the Philippine Daily Inquirer. More recently, when inducting the new officers of the AdBoard, Benigno Aquino III called on advertisers not to support media organizations (in both print and broadcast) guilty of “sensationalism” and false reporting.

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COMMISSION on Human Rights chair Loretta Rosales was right: the death penalty has no place in any legal system — make that in any civilized legal system — but the rest of her statement the day after Sally Ordinario-Villanueva and Ramon Credo were executed in Xiamen, China, and Elizabeth Batain in Shenzhen, also in China, was off the mark.

Rosales issued a statement condemning the death penalty, but also declared that Ordinario-Villanueva, Credo and Batain had been “twice victimized,” first by the drug syndicates that used them, supposedly without their knowledge, to smuggle drugs abroad, and second by the “inflexibilities” of the Chinese judicial system. Rosales also took the opportunity to suggest that China consider abolishing the death penalty.

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