Pity my favorite senator, Nene Pimentel. His pet bill, the Right of Reply Bill, is slowly getting smothered, with the Philippine press now unleashing a torrent of criticism against the proposed legislation and with lawmakers who had initially supported the bill now abandoning it. As they should.

The other day, Pimentel appealed to the press to reason with him, to present to him clear arguments against the bill. Another lawmaker, Kiko Pangilinan, urged journalists to help improve the bill.

Journalists, of course, should not take the bait. As I have pointed out in this space weeks ago, the premise of the bill – that news organizations and journalists should publish or air whatever the subject of news or commentary sends in as a form of reply because if they don’t they’d get arrested, fined, shuttered or imprisoned – is way wrong, not to mention unconstitutional. (What would prevent a politician, for example, from refusing to be interviewed and then later claim that his side or reply was not published and so the journalist should be punished?) The moment journalists face Pimentel and the others in the Senate and suggest ways to improve the bill, they would in effect accept the premise of the bill. So the best way to counter it is to reject its premise.

This is not to say, of course, that Pimentel did not have valid reasons to author a proposed law that would ultimately usurp the power and responsibilities of journalists, a medicine that has a great potential for becoming worse than the disease it ostensibly intends to cure. If anything, the bill’s existence and the support it got should be a reminder to journalists to be responsible with their power because the state, particularly a repressive one, will always try to exploit the shortcomings of the media in order to control, muzzle or manipulate it .

To paraphrase a favorite quote, the answer to bad journalism is not legislation, but good journalism. And I don’t see how the Right of Reply Bill, because it is draconian in many respects, can produce good journalism. On the contrary, it will be the newsroom’s Sword of Damocles. Such an environment of fear can no way foster good journalism.

Apart from the wrong premise, my beef against this bill is that it assumes that irresponsible journalism is so widespread in the Philippines that the situation has become hopeless so that a law like this is imperative. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Its licentiousness notwithstanding, the Philippine press remains a functioning tool in our democracy. It has shown its capacity and willingness to check the abuses of those in power, for example. Investigative journalism is something that the Philippine press can be proud of, comparable to, or even better than, the rest in the region.

The bill intends to take away from journalists the editorial prerogative and responsibility to determine fact from fiction, the truth from propaganda. It wants the press to become a mere regurgitator of information, whether verified or not. I’m not sure if Pimentel et al realized this but by pushing for this bill, they imperil the very kind of journalism that has helped so-called fiscalizers (among them senators) to expose malfeasance in government.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.