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.

In the Dec. 31 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, there’s a story about “Red Rose,” or Rose Ann Gumanoy, the daughter of Eddie Gumanoy, the peasant leader who was allegedly killed by the military in 2003. The story on the front page was enclosed in a red box, the Inquirer’s way of signaling to the reader that what he’s reading is good news (as opposed to bad news).

I can’t, for the life of me, understand how Rose Ann’s story can be considered a positive story. I don’t see how her decision to become a military agent – in the sense that she is out there being used by the military in its campaign of vilification and red-baiting against groups such as Karapatan – can be a good thing.

You see, Rose Ann, who said she joined the communist New People’s Army to avenge her father’s death, had been abducted by military agents, then turned against her mother and family, and is now saying that she intends to lead a normal life by going back to school, courtesy of the military’s goodwill.

A normal life? If you were a communist guerrilla, becoming a military agent hardly qualifies as “going back to a normal life.” For one, you open yourself to possible retaliation from the guerrillas, especially if they’ve proven that you actively engage in acts that they would consider counter-revolutionary, such as snitching on other rebels.

“A normal life” would be to disappear from public view, to live a quiet existence. In my years as a journalist, I had come across former guerrillas who successfully transitioned from being armed fighters into ordinary citizens. And they did it without being used by the military, without disparaging former comrades or groups such as Karapatan.

To be sure, Rose Ann’s case was unusual because she had been abducted by the military. I am certain she went through hell when she was taken into custody. I am certain she had been interrogated, probably even tortured, that she had been told that her life as a guerrilla was pointless. She probably was even brainwashed into thinking that what her father did as a peasant leader was wrong and that he probably was an NPA as well.

This is not, of course, surprising because this is not the first time that the army does this sort of thing. It is SOP for the military to turn every NPA guerrilla it captured into a potential snitch, and to use him or her for propaganda purposes. They did this more famously in the case of Jelyn Dayong, a guerrilla who was captured in Mindanao after a firefight and, after being subjected to God knows what, is now a soldier.

This brings me to Rose Ann’s tirade against Karapatan, a human-rights group that has, since the Marcos dictatorship, done for human rights what others only paid lip service to. The military’s familiar line, which Rose Ann apparently willingly fed the Inquirer, is that Karapatan is a front of the NPA. She even went to the extent of saying that Karapatan had deliberately prevented her from attending court hearings because the group only wanted her to recuperate so she could go back posthaste to the hills, as if the NPA’s command center is right here near Matalino Street, in Quezon City, where Karapatan holds office.

This is pure rubbish. For one, this is not the Karapatan that I, in my years of covering human rights, know. This is not the Karapatan that a majority of ex-guerrillas know. This is not the Karapatan that hundreds of victims of human-rights abuses know.

Rose Ann’s Karapatan, however, is the Karapatan according to the military. For decades now, the military has trained its guns on Karapatan, not just in terms of propaganda but also in terms of actually murdering its members and advocates. (Rose Ann’s father, Eddie, was killed along with Eden Marcellano, Karapatan’s secretary-general in Southern Tagalog.) Why?

Because a great number of the human-rights abuses in this country is committed by the military and the police. (Even the government’s Commission on Human Rights agrees on this.) Because hapless victims of human-rights abuses do not run to the police or government for succor – they go to Karapatan and other human-rights groups.

Does Karapatan have links with the communists? I’m sure it has. But that is only because most human-rights abuses occur in the countryside, where the NPA operates most actively. Moreover, many of the victims were either captured guerrillas or peasants or poor residents who have fallen victims to the massive militarization that occurs regularly in the provinces.

But guess who cries out first each time the military launches offensives that displace, maim and kill Filipinos? Guess who investigates the deaths of peasants and activists and, while you’re at it, guess who continues to deny that these atrocities actually happen? Guess who denounces these abuses? Guess who exposes itself to risks in order to defend people who otherwise would have been killed or abducted by state agents?

In the Philippines, there exists a policy of systematically hunting down, abducting, torturing, and killing dissidents and critics. And groups like Karapatan get in the way. So they, too, have to be eliminated.

To put it simply, it is in the interest of the military to discredit Karapatan.

In fairness to Rose Ann, I am sure she was pressured by the military to do what she’s doing against Karapatan. What she said about the group is something that can only be said if she was under duress. If the military really cared about her welfare – and not to score propaganda points against Karapatan – it should never have turned Rose Ann into a mouthpiece.

(I can almost see the comments coming now: Why am I railing against the military’s abuses? Aren’t the guerrillas guilty of abuses as well? Well, for one, Karapatan is not an underground organization, so the state cannot treat it like one. For another, as I have pointed out, most abuses are committed by state security forces. For yet another, the guerrillas are guerrillas for a reason: they operate outside the ambit of the state. If they violate human rights, they will have to answer for it in one way or another. But the state, the military, the police – they are not supposed to violate human rights. They are supposed to be the people’s protector. They are supposed to uphold human rights, not violate it. They cannot defend themselves from allegations of abuse by pointing their fingers at the guerrillas – that is not only infantile but suggests that they consider themselves no better than the enemies of the state, which would be tragic because the state should have the moral high ground in its campaign against its enemies. The state cannot proclaim its adherence to human rights by pointing out the violations of non-state actors like the NPA.)

Again, it boggles my mind that Rose Ann Gumanoy would consider it “a normal life” being a veritable agent of the military at the expense of a group whose advocacy and track record in defending human rights and civil liberties are well-known, whose commitment to defend those violated by those in power is matched only by the viciousness of the same people who murdered her father and countless others nationwide, who “Red Rose” now swears are her protectors.

The only possible explanation for this is that she had a gun to her head while talking to the Inquirer.
Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Journalists are accountable to the public. They have a covenant with their audience. Their main currencies are accuracy and fairness. I don’t think these should apply to bloggers who use such a loose, free-wheeling medium that has great potential for misuse. Bloggers are generally only accountable to themselves.

The discipline in blogging is different from journalism. Bloggers can be, and are allowed to be, whimsical. Journalists are involved in a fact-checking process that should have no room for whimsy. Bloggers can be trigger-happy because the medium tempts the undisciplined to shoot his mouth off. We expect journalists not to behave like that.

Journalists who blog, like me, therefore put themselves in a dilemma: When I blog, do I stop being a journalist? I have been asking myself this question ever since I realized the mistakes I committed in my posts on the Pangandaman case.

By blogging about public issues or events – things that I should otherwise be covering as a journalist – I exposed myself to the intellectual and ethical trip-ups that are inherent in blogging. For instance, does my audience distinguish the blogger from the journalist? When I, as a blogger, commit errors, does the distinction still hold so that if my credibility as a blogger suffers, my credibility as a journalist remains intact?

By blogging, am I not, though unwittingly, promoting a medium that, because of its great potential for misuse, can in fact damage my journalism?

One can argue that the medium is not the problem; it’s how people use it. One can also argue that the mainstream press has always been full of irresponsible reportage and careless commentary way before blogging was invented. But that’s not an argument for journalists to start blogging about public issues – it is an argument against it. The answer to bad journalism is good journalism, not blogging.

Blogging is neat if all I blog about is how cute my sons are. But looking back at my blogging output over the years, particularly recently, I see that I had been drawn into a world where it is extremely easy to carelessly regurgitate lies and half-truths, even asinine thought. While blogging provides a venue where I can say whatever I want to say, particularly things that I am not able to say in my journalistic pieces because of the conventions and restrictions of my profession, I now think that it might be impossible to make a distinction between my journalist self and my blogging doppelganger. I can, of course, continue wearing both hats for as long as I could but sooner or later, something’s got to give.

Make no mistake: I have always been an opinionated person. Even before some genius coined the word blog, I was already writing commentary and opinion pieces, ignoring the view held by many that reporters should not voice their opinion publicly because it would betray their bias and, as a result, make it difficult for them to do their job as reporters. (This is why you seldom see journalists writing columns. And most of those who did decide to become pundits did so after retiring from the newsroom.)

Still, I’d like to think my opinion pieces were grounded on more solid information, on sounder analysis. These views were formed by my own journalistic appreciation of facts, not by some knee-jerk instinct to expose and shame members of a political dynasty allied with a regime that is mired in corruption. But in my rush, fueled by outrage, to make public my opinion about a potentially explosive issue, I threw all caution and good judgment to the wind. I forgot that I was, before anything else, a journalist.

It would be a disservice to society if journalists lost sight of who they are and what they do and resort to just whining in their blogs about matters that they should otherwise be investigating.

An argument can be made that journalists, because of their training, would be in a better position to blog about public issues and events. Can’t I apply in my blogging the very same discipline I use in my journalism? I certainly can, though it would be mighty difficult, probably even impossible. Blogging, by its very nature, cannot be endowed with the same characteristics that make journalism such an important force in our society -- gate-keeping to filter the irrelevant and verification to root out the lies; an editorial system whose bedrock is the objective processing of data and information.

If bloggers adopted these characteristics, well and good. And to their credit, a number of news organizations allow their journalists to blog, although unlike the regular blogger, what these journalists write in their blogs are subject to the same editorial process that their stories go through. And those journalists who blog outside the purview of their editors are cognizant enough of the possible effect blogging has on their journalism that they put disclaimers on their blogs. In other words, many journalists are able to use blogging to improve their journalism.

Having said that, however, I don’t think it is wise of journalists to impose their values and their methods on bloggers, and vice versa. It not only seems arrogant – it is pointless. As I’ve said, blogging and journalism are different animals. The best they can do is complement each other.

Case in point: the story of Meliton Zamora, the janitor at the University of the Philippines who retired broke because, as a blog earlier said, the student loans he had guaranteed while employed at the university had not been paid by the students and so UP supposedly deducted all those loans from his retirement benefits. While the blog first brought Zamora’s plight to the public, it was not entirely accurate: turns out only one loan had not been paid (5,000 pesos) and the reason he retired penniless was because UP did not pay him the sick leaves that Zamora insists he never availed. But as a result of the blog, the mainstream press got wind of the story and the Inquirer later ran a front-page article about Zamora – and set the record straight. To be sure, other bloggers could correct the error but I doubt if they would spend the same amount of time, energy and resources that the Inquirer had put in writing Zamora’s story.

While I am certain that most bloggers do not entertain the notion that what they do can be considered journalism, there are a few but vociferous of them who do, exploiting the sins and shortcomings of the mainstream press to promote themselves as the alternative to mainstream media. I am an advocate of alternative journalism but I am not entirely sold to the idea that “blogging is the new journalism” or that so-called citizen journalists, with blogging as one of their tools, would eventually run journalism out the door.

Moreover, these bloggers often insist that old media types resist the advent of new media. That’s nonsense. The reason most mainstream news media in the Philippines are slow to adapt new media is not so much resistance but a failure to fully grasp new media’s potentials and a passivity and complacency born out of the fact that what they do right now seems to still work so they don’t feel compelled to change.

It’s an attitude that will change, however, once old media’s bottomline is hit hard by declining print advertising, as we are seeing in the US, or once they see that the domain that they have occupied for decades is being threatened by new media. They will not resist this change simply because they know they cannot win. To insist, therefore, that they are pigheaded has-beens trying to keep the status quo, as if they are a bunch of Luddites, would be to ignore the technological advances journalists have made in newsrooms around the world in the past 75 years.

We will soon see, in other words, these old media denizens improving journalism using new media technology, and the public will be the better for it. Because, really, if there’s anybody who’s in the best position right now to use new media to improve journalism, it’s those who are already in the newsrooms, and not some blogger in a pajama trying his shrillest best to carve a niche in a crowded market by turning blogging into a tool for what amounts to nothing but heckling. (Hecklers proliferate in the blogosphere because that’s apparently one way to get noticed.)

Think about it: Who do you think runs most of the web-based and multimedia news organizations in the world? Yes, that’s correct: Journalists who earned their spurs in the newsrooms of old media.

Still, journalists who blog and who value their profession have no choice, I think, but to navigate the blogging terrain carefully. As I found out in my case, being also a blogger eventually clashed with my values and instincts as a journalist. It’s tough to play by the rules in a game that practically has none.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila. He writes for The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and GlobalPost.com. Several of his work can be viewed here.

I’ve been thinking long and hard lately about blogging and how, at least in my case, it fosters intellectual indolence, which can be detrimental to a journalist like me.

Blogging is a great invention. Used properly, it complements journalism in ways that are not possible five or 10 years ago. More importantly, blogging democratizes expression and has proved crucial in the struggle by many citizens in repressive regimes to be heard.

Since the Pangandaman case exploded, however, I have been entertaining the idea that maybe blogging is best left to people who have advocacies and causes but are shut out by the mainstream media. Or those who have interesting things to say about themselves, or what they had for dinner last night, or why The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a charming but tedious movie.

Blogging was not invented for journalists and, as such, may not be an ideal medium for them. (Indeed, some even believe that blogging was invented precisely to get around the conventions of mainstream journalism.) It is clear to me now that journalism is one hat, blogging is another. And a journalist, in my view, cannot wear two hats -- especially those that, because of their respective nature, simply don’t fit if worn at the same time.

I would be lying if I said that this self-examination was not prompted by the so-called “golf war” and how it played out, i.e. that the Valley Golf and Country Club management had practically exonerated the Pangandamans, who have been vilified on the Internet left and right.

Although I still stand by what I wrote in this space – that the Pangandamans behaved like warlords and that Nasser Pangandaman Sr. did not deserve his appointment as peace negotiator because, hell, he couldn’t even stop a simple misunderstanding from escalating into a brawl – I realized that it was an incomplete assessment of what had happened.

The problem lies, of course, with the fact that I, like the gazillion of bloggers out there, relied solely on the word of Bambee dela Paz, whose account of the incident was, as can be expected, biased. Although she may not know it at the time, her post was a classic example of propaganda warfare: if you want to control the agenda, put out your version first, as quickly as you can. The more heartbreaking the tale, the better.

From a propaganda standpoint, the odds were stacked against the Pangandamans. They not only belonged to a political class that is easy to pigeonhole and excoriate, they behaved precisely as people who belong to that class would behave. Plus, they apparently do not blog.

Bambee dela Paz certainly was well within her right to publish that post. And I’m glad that she did, because, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, blogging can be a tool to correct an injustice. She merely used a medium that allowed her – no, expected her -- to do exactly what she did.

The same can be said of the other bloggers, whose outrage, as can be gleaned from their posts and the comments sections of their blogs, quickly turned into the digital equivalent of a mass lynching, which is fine, because the medium allows that. I was the guy in red shirt with the baseball bat shouting “Let’s kill these bastards!”

As a journalist, I should have known better.

In itself, the brawl at the Valley Golf was a fascinating story, with an even fascinating backstory from each side: a family of powerful politicians from a region known for their goons and guns versus a family of golfers trying to make it big in golf.

I felt strongly about what had happened (at least according to Bambee) but instead of investigating the incident and get to the truth of it, as any journalist ought to do and as I have done in other stories in the past, I put on my other hat and merely blogged about it.

Did I attempt to get the side of the Pangandamans? I did not. Did I investigate whether what Bambee dela Paz wrote was accurate or truthful? I did not. My outrage had been vented, so why bother? It was so goddamn easy.

Blogging about the golf brawl allowed me to let off steam. What that did was give me visceral pleasure – I hate arrogant pricks, particularly arrogant pricks who hold office -- but it waylaid my instincts as a journalist.

Let me make it clear that I am not blaming blogging per se, just as I am not faulting radio for the rise of so-called shock jocks or newspapers for those pseudo-journalists, called hao-shiao, who extort money from politicians and corrupt customs officials.

What happened in my case is more the result of a lack of discipline to fight the temptation – strongest among bloggers -- to shoot first and ask questions later. That baseball bat was so conveniently within reach.

But it must be said that, because of its nature, blogging is such that it is very easy to be lazy, irresponsible and careless with it.

(Next: Why blogging and journalism don’t mix)

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila. He writes for The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and GlobalPost.com. Several of his work can be viewed here.

During the past several weeks, an advertisement has been appearing in the Philippines's major newspapers that extols aspartame, the artificial sweetener. The ad, about half a page in size, makes the assertion that aspartame is safe and that the food-and-drug regulatory agencies of the Philippines and of the United States, among other countries, have determined it to be so. The ad does not carry the name of any group or individual, thus it is safe to assume that the aspartame industry is behind it.

I am always convinced that if somebody tries to mislead the public, he would publish advertisements so frequently until the public accepts the ad's assertion as the truth. This was the strategy that Joseph Goebbels used and perfected in selling Nazism to the German people. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” Goebbels had said. This is the underlying principle of advertising and public relations.

The question is, Why would the makers of aspartame spend millions of pesos to convince the public about the safety of their product? Particularly at a time when the use of the sweetener, so far as I can tell, is exploding in the Philippines, what with softdrink companies recently launching supposedly sugarless versions of their products that use aspartame.

I am sure the answer lies in the fact that there's still much debate about the safety of aspartame.
Try Googling the word “aspartame” and you'll probably be surprised to learn that, of the first 10 results, at least six are for sites that tackle the dangers of the sweetener. Elsewhere on the Internet, there's a whole bunch of websites and blogs that tell you that aspartame is never safe (here, here, here, and here). A victim of aspartame even has a documentary about it, which you can view here.

(As an aside, I've learned that the Philippines was supposedly the first to try to ban aspartame. Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago even filed a proposed law to outlaw the use of aspartame. Obviously, this proposal failed.)

It would be so easy to dismiss these websites and blogs as the product of conspiracy theorists and idle minds -- if not for the fact that there has been credible reportage about the dangers of aspartame. One of them was published by The New York Times in this lengthy February 2006 article, titled “The Lowdown on Sweet.” The article talks about the result of a research that determined that aspartame caused cancer in rats. (View the research's abstract here.)

And then there are these undisputed facts:

• Aspartame was first manufactured and patented by G.D. Searle, a so-called “life sciences” company that was later bought by the biotech giant Monsanto

• In 1977, Donald Rumsfield - yes, this Donald Rumsfield - was hired by Searle to become its CEO. He allegedly vowed to use his clout in Washington to have aspartame approved by federal regulators.

• In 1981, Ronald Reagan was elected president and picked Rumsfield to be part of his transition team, which selected Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. to be the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

• Within that same year, Hayes created a “public board of inquiry” to determine the validity of the allegations against aspartame, among them that it caused brain tumor. Three of the six board members voted against aspartame. But Hayes later overturned the board's recommendation and approved aspartame initially for dry products.

• Hayes was later accused of impropriety while in office, involving mainly companies that had business with aspartame. After his resignation, Hayes was hired by Burson-Marsteller, the PR firm of Searle and Monsanto, as a scientific consultant.

(For more about how aspartame became legal, check out this timeline, where I took some of the information above.)

The Calorie Control Council, an industry group in the United States, disputes all the allegations against aspartame. In its Web site, the council declares that aspartame has "great taste without the calories for today's healthful lifestyles." It adds that "few compounds have withstood such detailed testing and repeated, close scrutiny, and the process through which aspartame has gone should provide the public with additional confidence of its safety."

It also quoted the American Cancer Society as saying that "current evidence does not demonstrate any link between aspartame ingestion and increased cancer risk. Aspartame has not been associated with other health problems except among people with the genetic disorder, phenylketonuria."

The council also quoted the American Council on Science and Health: "In fact, aspartame, known as 'NutraSweet' and 'Equal,' is safe. Aspartame is one of the most thoroughly tested substances in the U.S. food supply. Numerous authorities, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives of the FAO/WHO, the European Community, and the American Medical Association have concluded that aspartame is a safe product, except in the rare cases of phenylketonuria."

The council dismissed those who have been campaigning against aspartame on the Internet and in the media, calling their campaign hoaxes. "Despite the overwhelming documentation of aspartame's safety, unfounded allegations that aspartame is associated with a myriad of ailments, including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and lupus, have continued to be spread via the Internet and the media by a few individuals who have no documented scientific or medical expertise."

Reading all the stuff about aspartame could make your head explode. But what convinced me that aspartame is not safe are not just the studies that have found its link to many diseases but also the efforts of Donald Rumsfield and Searle/Monsanto in ramming this product down our throats.

Monsanto, as you know, is the world's leading producer of genetically modified products - another innovation that many are convinced has already wrought havoc on human life and the ecosystem -- and uses not just money and influence but also threat and intimidation on those who go against it, as this Vanity Fair investigative report makes clear.

Indeed, Monsanto's track record alone is enough to convince me that this product can kill me.

You may wonder by now why am I saying and linking to all these bad things about aspartame. Well, in the past several years, since I became rather overweight, I have been using aspartame as a sweetener for my coffee. Truth be told, I began to like the taste of aspartame in my brewed coffee -- tasted better than sugar, in fact.

And then some weeks ago, I found out that I have Type 2 diabetes. My endocrinologist told me, rather convincingly, that I should stop using sugar entirely and start using aspartame regularly.

One night, a friend asked me how I was after my diagnosis and I told her I was fine. She asked me about sugar and I told her about the sweetener I was using. Her reaction was, to put it mildly, insane. “No! No! No! Why? Why? It can harm you, Caloy!” she shrieked and went on to narrate what happened to her husband and how she is convinced aspartame made his recovery difficult.

As with many among us who research about a disease only when it actually afflicts us, I turned to my friend Google. The things that I learned about aspartame blew me away. No bliss at all in this ignorance. I didn't know I had been ingesting what these sites and blogs and documentaries say is poison - sweet, sweet poison.

And my fears about aspartame have been reaffirmed by the relentless advertising campaign in the Philippine media by the makers of aspartame. I thought, if this product is really as safe as sugar, as the ads imply, they should never have to spend a centavo to convince me.

So no more sweeteners, no more sugarless drinks, etc. for me. Part of my reading habit now is to peruse food labels, which is not an easy task because the labels are printed as though only ants should be able to read them and because my eyesight is failing.

It would be tough for a diabetic like me to find an alternative for aspartame but I'm sure I can find one. (If you know of any, please share it with me.)

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

There is injustice in the world. The family of Bambee dela Paz, the golfer whose father and brother were manhandled by the sons of Agrarian Reform Secretary and peace negotiator Nasser Pangandaman Sr., knows this very well.

Bambee’s post about the mauling has since exploded on the Internet and single-handedly turned the table against a powerful family with a direct line to the president. This underscored once again the potential of the Internet to be used by victims to seek justice. Bambee and her family are lucky to have such a medium in their arsenal. I don’t think I can say the same thing about other poorer Filipinos who have been victimized by those in power.

Blogging is, by its very nature, a personal medium. This is why bloggers tend to write much more forcefully about an injustice if it hits them on a personal level, as it did the dela Pazes.

But as we’ve seen in this case – and in other cases as well, most notably the Brian Gorrell imbroglio – once you blog about a wrong done to you, the whole blogosphere runs to your side, offering help and encouragement, even vengeance on your behalf. Once this happens, the mission to correct an injustice becomes a lot less personal -- it becomes a movement.

If there’s one thing the Pangandamans probably regretted by now, it is that they did not check first if the people they violated had a blog, which, as we’ve seen, can be mightier than the goons of a trapo. The Pangandamans, powerful and arrogant, have been shamed and are now pleading to bloggers to please stop the vitriol. For this alone, the dela Pazes have scored a victory.

Now, for Bambee and her supporters, the inevitable question arises: Is this it? We have demonstrated that we have so much power as bloggers, and is this it? What next?

The thing about blogging is that it is so personal that whatever you post on your blog naturally flows from your experiences. So one moment you raise hell about the arrogance of those in power and, the next, you wonder aloud why the lip gloss you just bought doesn’t seem to have enough sheen. Truth be told, movements like Bambee’s are few and far between. Much of the blogosphere is inundated with stuff that are irrelevant, inconsequential and, well, personal. Then again, as I pointed out above, that is the original nature of blogging.

The key word is “original” because, as we’ve seen, blogging is evolving. Blogging today is much different from blogging four or five years ago. Five years ago, blogs are like Twitter today: the medium is there and you’re still figuring out how to use it, so you publish just about anything, such as the crappy movie you and your girlfriend are watching or the hot chick you are ogling at the supermarket counter. These tell a thing or two about you or what you are doing but, in the larger scheme of things, they are meaningless and irrelevant. But is this all that we can do with a medium so evidently powerful?

Today, blogging, apart from being both a narcissistic and cathartic exercise of self-expression among millions, is a potent information tool. News organizations use it to complement their journalism (take note: complement, not supplant). Activists use it to promote their cause. Victims use it to right a wrong.

I guess what I’m saying is that bloggers like Bambee can – and should – use their newfound power and influence to right the wrongs done on other people. And, by God, there is so much injustice being committed out there! Yet, except in the circles of activists and human-rights advocates, I have not seen the same level of outrage in the blogosphere over the disappearance of Jonas Burgos, of Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, of the atrocity done to Remegio Saladero Jr. and the hundreds of human-rights victims in the Philippines as we have witnessed in the Pangandaman incident.

A post thanking your multitude of supporters is nice but not quite enough. Bloggers who benefited from the power of blogging to correct the injustice done to them have a duty, I believe, to pay society back. And the only way I can think of is for them to raise hell, too, about the injustice done to other people, particularly the oppressed ones – those who are too poor and marginalized to even own a computer, let alone know that there is such a thing as a blog.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

In 1986-87, I joined a group called “Youth for Cory and Doy” in Cagayan de Oro City, where I grew up. It was my first taste of political activism, and it was exhilarating. There I was, a freshman in college, staying out late at night at the city plaza, singing decidedly subversive songs, joining other activists to denounce Ferdinand Marcos. Like many Filipinos at the time, I was convinced that Cory Aquino, the widow of the assassinated Marcos foe Sen. Benigno Aquino, was definitely better than the dictator; that, although she was what Marcos had derisively called a “mere housewife,” she represented a moral, honest leadership. She promised a new beginning for all of us.

Today, more than two decades after the Filipino people toppled the dictator, I am not sorry that I joined the struggle to oust Marcos and install Cory to the presidency - despite the fact that Cory, for all her much-vaunted success in restoring democracy and all that, turned out to be one of the worst presidents we have had.

I am not sorry because ousting Marcos was the right thing to do, regardless of how it turned out later, regardless of how Cory and her minions bungled every opportunity to make this country great again.

I wished Cory had thought as well that ousting Joseph Estrada in 2001 was the right thing to do, an act that should not be second-guessed just because of how Estrada's succesor, Gloria Arroyo, performed later.

But by apologizing to Estrada this week for leading the movement to remove him, Cory essentially proclaimed that the Filipinos in Edsa Dos were all wrong in ousting a corrupt president.

Make no mistake - Estrada did not deserve to be president. He was corrupt. Worse, he was incompetent. He is a convicted plunderer later pardoned by an equally corrupt regime.

Corazon Aquino is viewed a saint because we often compare her to the monster that was Marcos. But a look at what she had done as president should convince us that she is anything but.

When Cory took power, the Philippine foreign debt was around $26 billion. As a supposedly revolutionary government, her regime was well within its right to repudiate that debt, most of which were odious debts anyway. But Cory did not.

She succumbed to the pressure of international creditors, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as governments such as the US, which propped up the dictator Marcos (a support that, in turn, allowed him to amass all that debt) and later propped up Cory. The pressure was such that even Cory's finance secretary at that time, Jaime Ongpin, threatened to resign if Cory repudiated our debts.

And so, to this day, we are saddled by the effects of this (in)decision, with the largest chunk of our national budget going to interest payments alone, taking away money that should be going to education and health care.

To be sure, repudiating the debt would have had serious consequences, something that Ongpin and his friends at the IMF and World Bank had warned about (then again, Ongpin et al were also against the idea of a debt-repayment cap of at least 10 percent of export earnings). But such a repudiation, or at least a repayment scheme that would be easy for Filipinos, would have been the right thing to do. Cory did no such thing.

While the Marcos dictatorship was responsible for horrendous human rights abuses, it was during Cory's term that the “total war policy” against leftists and their perceived supporters was launched systematically and cold-bloodedly - a policy that continues to this day, albeit going by other names like Oplan Bantay Laya. It was during her term that cannibal vigilantes went on a rampage in the provinces, used by the Philippine military to terrorize villagers and activists.

Again, as a president whose ascent to power was partly made possible by a broad people's movement, the “total war policy” against the Left was a betrayal, to say the least. (Don't believe the myth being peddled by some that the Left was not at Edsa during the first people power. For one, many of them were not there because they were busy fighting the dictator's army in the hills, their victory in the countryside no doubt helping to cripple the dictatorship. For another, they had been in the streets, braving Marcos's water cannons and batons and bullets way before the middle class and the “snooty members” of society that supported Cory decided it was cool to march to EDSA, rosary in hand.)

She had been taken hostage by the military establishment, which later developed a sense of entitlement to “people power” as shown by their later assertions that such a revolt can only succeed if the military “withdraws support” from the sitting regime. This was evident in the movement to oust Estrada and the attempt to topple Arroyo.

Never able to rise above her class interest, Cory was also responsible for the monumental failure of the country's agrarian reform program. She promised to make it the centerpiece program of her administration and she failed at it miserably, as we can see now. Then again, to believe that a landlord would give away her land just like that is to believe a liar when he says “Trust me.”

It was Cory's regime that crafted and passed a faulty agrarian-reform law that gave too much leeway to landlords, allowing them to duck the program, and not enough resources to peasants and farmers that would allow them to develop whatever land they would get out of it.

The program was a failure because the Congress was, and still is, dominated by landlords. It was designed to fail. Cory, of all people, should know how silly the idea that landlords would just easily give up their lands. Proof: Hacienda Luisita remains in the hands of her family, when it should have been the first one to be parceled out to farmers if she really wanted the program to succeed.

(Need I point out that the Mendiola Massacre and the Lupao Massacre - atrocities that victimized peasants and farmers mainly -- occurred during Cory's term as well?)

And so to the groups who allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the agrarian-reform program and are now castigating Bayan Muna's Satur Ocampo, who had long insisted that it was a bogus program and should not be extended, I say this: you deal with the devil, don't be surprised if you get burned.

And now, Cory Aquino is sorry that she helped oust the corrupt Joseph Estrada. Filipinos who struggle for good governance and accountability should take that as an insult. What other atrocity will Corazon Aquino inflict upon us?

Corazon Cojuangco Aquino an icon of democracy and moral leadership? She is an icon of everything that is wrong with this country.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi television journalist who hurled his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press briefing in Iraq's Green Zone, has become a folk hero. His outburst, while denounced by many, has been praised throughout the Arab world, by anti-imperialist activists, even by some Americans who are critical of the US invasion of Iraq.

No matter how we view his action, this is undeniable: His rage is rooted in his own experience not so much as a journalist but as an Iraqi citizen.

In mainstream journalism, we are told that we have to be objective in the stories that we write and report. In a perfect world, objectivity should be an ideal that every journalist should aspire to achieve. But we, most of all Muntadar al-Zaidi, don't live in a perfect world.

There has always been a debate on how a journalist should conduct himself given the injustice he witnessed first hand. Should he just write about it? Or should he actively take part in the event to ensure that the injustice doesn't happen or continue?

This reminds me of Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist who shot to fame for his Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a vulture ready to pounce on a weak child in famine-torn Sudan. He later committed suicide because he was haunted by the “vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen,” and presumably because he did not do enough to help the child in his picture.

Some said that if Carter had not been a journalist, he probably would have helped the child - as if journalism necessarily strips us of our humanity, of our compassion and of the need to take a stand.

Journalists are hamstrung by the conventions of mainstream journalism, most of all by this animal called objectivity. This is why, no matter how the Bush administration lies about Iraq, the journalists who cover his press conferences wouldn't dare question him to his face about these lies, let alone throw a shoe at him - because doing so, to question the official line, would be impolite and would make you less objective in the eyes of those you cover and your colleagues. A good journalist, in this context, is one that parrots the official line.

This is probably what IF Stone meant when he once said that “objectivity is just an excuse to regurgitate the conventional wisdom of the day,” or words to that effect. Objectivity, in other words, turns journalists into unthinking and unfeeling robots.

But back to al-Zaidi. What he did was to show that he is a citizen before anything else; that he, too, feels the pain of his fellow Iraqis. It would be best, of course, if he demonstrated his outrage by being a hard-hitting and critical journalist - and there seems to be no indication that he did not; after all, he would reportedly sign off his TV reports by saying “…reporting from occupied Iraq, this is Muntadar al-Zaidi” - but, in his context, I think it would be difficult to judge him for what he did.

We can all argue till we are blue in the face that throwing a shoe at a visiting head of state is uncivilized but compared to the crimes committed against the Iraqi people all these years, often with the direct participation or complicity of the United States, that is nothing. A supreme act of insult like throwing a shoe at somebody is something that, much like spitting at someone in the face, inevitably raises a far more important question: What did you do to deserve it?

As to al-Zaidi, his career as a journalist may have gone kaput, at least in the mainstream press. But I guess that's a price he was willing to pay for taking a stand. Because, after all is said and done, that is what al-Zaidi's shoe throwing really means. And because he actually did what many Iraqis have only been dreaming of doing to George W. Bush all these years, I bet that made him prouder of himself than all the years he spent covering the news.

Is he a rotten journalist because of this? It depends, although I don't think you can witness an injustice and bottle up the rage it creates in you without acting on it when the opportunity comes. Al-Zaidi is a journalist. He knows the story of Iraq perhaps more than anybody else. But more than anything else, he's an Iraqi citizen. He feels the pain of his people perhaps more than any journalist in Baghdad does. Did we really expect him to just sit there and watch Bush lie through his teeth again and insult the memory of those who suffered in Iraq because of America's act of aggression?

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Andrea: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.
Galileo: No, Andrea. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.
- (“Life of Galileo” by Bertolt Brecht)

In June, when he was scheduled to fight the Mexican David Diaz, I wished that Manny Pacquiao would lose. He, of course, won that match via a TKO in the 9th round.

Last Sunday, as Pacquiao happily jogged to the ring buoyed by Queen's “We will, we will rock you!” I wished again for him to, just this once, lose. He, of course, pummeled Oscar de la Hoya to submission.

Tough luck.

I checked Pacquiao's stats and was actually dumbfounded to learn (you can tell by now that I'm no boxing nerd) that in his 11 fights since December 2004, Pacquiao only lost once, in a unanimous decision at that in favor of Erik Morales, in March 2005. Twice after that, of course, in rematches in 2006, Pacquiao made sure that Morales realized that that victory in 2005 had been a fluke.

I do not wish Pacquiao ill. Indeed, he is probably the greatest boxer we ever had. As I wrote in this piece on the day he showed de la Hoya that a boxing legend cannot wear fishnets and tutu and get away with it, he is a source of inspiration to many young and poor Filipinos who dream of striking it big in boxing.

I wished for Pacquiao's defeat because, in another time and under different circumstances, I would embrace him as the national hero that many view him to be. But right now, he is such a national distraction.

I would even venture to say here that he might have a hand in the Arroyo regime's survival. Why, as I pointed out earlier, Pacquiao won all his fights, except one, from the time Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo allegedly stole the presidency in May 2004 up to the present. And each time, Arroyo used him to prop up her image and he willingly went along.

Each time Pacquiao fights, we seem to collectively press the PAUSE button on our national life. And after each victory, we press PLAY but we can't seem to focus on anything anymore because we are overwhelmed by the euphoria that inevitably ensues. It's like watching an episode of CSI while knitting at the same time.

I know, I know. Pacquiao provides a respite from all this political ruckus, you would say.

(And Malacanang thinks, too, that he does. Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said Sunday that Pacquiao was a “saving grace” because his victory came at time when all the “political noise” against the regime is loudest. Environment Secretary Lito Atienza even chose not to appear before the Senate to defend his department's budget and went instead to the US to watch the bout. “I consider it as a responsibility. Manny was facing the most important fight in his career and, of course, my worry was what will happen to our country if Manny loses,” Atienza was quoted as saying, by way of explaining his trip to Las Vegas.

Imagine that. This guy, whose department has absolutely nothing to do with sports, thinks that if Pacquiao lost, the country would be torn apart. Which is to say, perhaps, that it might put his master in Malacanang in trouble if Pacquiao did lose and suddenly Filipinos realized that they're, after all, in deeper shit than they cared to admit? Which kinda proves my point, doesn't it?)

Pacquiao does provide a respite from all the bad news and from all the political intrigue. (You often hear that these days, mostly from Filipinos abroad who, of course, left the motherland precisely because of all the problems we face.) But we can only invoke the significance of Pacquiao as an intermission if we've been doing enough to deal with all these problems.

By definition, a respite is a break from something that one has been doing regularly for some time. What exactly have we been doing lately?

Have we been storming the barricades and demanding accountability from this corrupt and oppressive regime? Have we expressed enough outrage over this regime's continued use of its power to muzzle the truth about the 2004 elections and other scandals? Have we shown enough indignation over the killings and kidnappings and disappearances and all the violations of civil liberties and human rights that continue to occur on a daily basis?

If we answer yes to these questions, then we can self-righteously invoke the give-us-a-break argument. If not, we don't deserve a hero like Manny Pacquiao.

Then again, considering our willingness to be razzle-dazzled by an excellent gladiator like him, perhaps we do.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

The advocates of press freedom in the Philippines are confronted with an unusual dilemma. A proposed law is being considered for passage in the Senate and the House of Representatives that, according to its proponents, would uphold press freedom but, on close reading by journalists, could actually curtail it.

The dilemma is that if the advocates participate in the discussion, they may end up unwittingly supporting the passage of the proposed law, called the Right of Reply Bill. Such an engagement necessarily means that they would be accepting the premise of this proposal.

But if, on the other hand, the advocates don't engage in the discussion of the bill, with the objective of fine-tuning it, to make it more palatable, the bill in its present form stands a great chance of being passed. At best, their silence would be interpreted to mean as surrender by default and, at worst, acquiescence.

Evidently, press freedom gets a beating either way. Which is a pity since journalists and advocates of press freedom should never have been put in this position in the first place.

With this in mind, I will not go into a detailed discussion of the merits, or lack thereof, of the Right of Reply Bill. What I will point out, however, is that press freedom advocates, journalists and the public should reject this bill not because it is flawed (it sure is) but because its assumptions about press freedom and media responsibility are wrong and, more importantly, the premise of the bill is a serious contravention of the Philippine Constitution.

In a nutshell, the Right of Reply Bill mandates that journalists and publishers in the different the media – newspapers, radio, television, the Internet – can be fined, imprisoned and their outlets closed if they fail to publish the reply of the subjects of their news and commentary. The reply should be in the same space, allotted the same amount of time and should be given the same prominence, and that the publication of the reply should be done in a matter of days after the original material being replied to was published or aired.

Senate Bill 1120 was filed in June 2004 by Sen. Aquilino Pimentel Jr. but the 13th Congress did not have enough time to approve the bill, which had gone as far as passing the third reading. Pimentel refiled his bill as soon as the next congress opened in June 2007 and was finally approved by the Senate in June this year.

At the House of Representatives, two bills were likewise filed, one by Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara of Aurora (House Bill 162) and the other by Rep. Monico Puentebella of Bacolod City (House Bill 1001). These two bills are up for third and final reading before they are consolidated with the Senate version.

Ever since Pimentel refiled his bill, other colleagues at the Senate, notably Ramon Revilla Jr. and Francis Escudero, have decided to not just support the bill but sponsor it as well. The House versions have likewise gotten broad support, with Speaker Prospero Nograles saying recently that he was inclined to support the bills.

The media, on the other hand, have been raising hell against the bills in editorials and columns, promising to challenge it in court if it gets approved.

Pimentel, meanwhile, had said that he had been a victim of unfair reporting by the press and filed the bill in order to correct what he viewed as a systemic problem in the media. "Let us make sure that we have an honest to goodness working remedy to balance the right of the mass media to publish what they want to publish with the right of the objects of their libel, defamation or criticism to explain their side within the ambit of the right of reply bill," he said at a forum in October 2007.

He tried to allay fears that his bill would curtail freedom of expression. "The bill will, in fact, widen the freedom of expression by obliging the media to provide space to the response and explanation of persons to media reports or commentaries that are inaccurate, unfair or biased against them and injurious to their reputation," Pimentel said last month.

But I say Pimentel's involvement all the more makes the bill insidious because the public regards the senator as a decent Filipino and one of the country's noted civil libertarians and a staunch defender of human rights. Sadly, he is using this image to push for a law that contradicts the very things – freedom, human rights, to name two — that he supposedly stands for, the very ideals that made him dear to Filipinos. Because Pimentel is the one who is so earnest in having this law passed, the danger is for the public to agree with him, to swallow everything he says about this proposal. After all, if it is all right with him, how can the Right of Reply Bill be so wrong?

In one fell swoop, the proposed Right of Reply law will undermine or take away the editorial prerogatives of journalists to print what they deem fit. Worse, this proposed law will intimidate journalists and prevent them from performing their watchdog functions because the potential cost of doing their job is rather high – fine, imprisonment or closure.

It will, in other words, control what the public reads, hears or sees in the media.

No recent legislative proposal has so brazenly attempted to violate the Bill of Rights — "No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press…" — than this one.

How things in the usually rambunctious Philippine media have come to this is subject to different interpretation. One view is that, as far as Pimentel is concerned, the proposed law is well-intentioned: its objective is to widen the democratic space, to allow – under pain of punishment by law – more voices to be heard in the Philippine press. Moreover, according to Pimentel, it seeks to balance the playing field in the Philippine press, given that, far too often, the subjects of negative news are either completely ignored by the media or are not given adequate time or space to air or publish their side.

Another interpretation, also propounded by Pimentel and the others who have sponsored the two versions in the Senate and the House, is that a Right of Reply law will force Filipino journalists to be responsible in how they do their job. The press being generally abusive (or so the perception goes), the proposed law will go a long way in making sure that news subjects, whether politician, government official or ordinary citizen, will not be victimized by the bias and the incompetence of the Philippine press.

I will not debate the merits of these rationales for the proposal because, truth be told, the Philippine press is as rowdy as it is irresponsible. The sins of the media that Pimentel and the others are now throwing at our faces to justify such a draconian measure are there for all to see.

Which is why, for its own good, the Philippine press should do better, and we certainly don't need a repressive law for us to do better. The best way to counter this proposed law is to prove that its premise is wrong, that regardless of our shortcomings, we have the capacity to be accurate and fair. Never mind balance, never mind objectivity. Just mind accuracy and fairness.

In other words, we should excel at what we do so that people like senators and congressmen, no matter how well-intentioned, will not entertain the arrogant idea that their notion of how the press should perform is far more important than the Bill of Rights.

(This commentary was first published in the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project website http://rightsreporting.net)

(The author is a journalist based in Manila. He writes for The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. He was secretary-general of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.)

Poor Jess Dureza. Because of what his office called an “eyebrow-raising phrase” in his prayer at a meeting on Tuesday in Malacanang, he has been getting brickbats from all sides.

If you recall, Dureza, in his prayer, wished that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will have the “tolerance to serve the nation until 2010 and beyond.” Dureza insists that in the ensuing immediate reaction - with Arroyo even grimacing and exclaiming something about God as soon as she heard it - the words “in her personal and private capacity” were drowned out.

And besides, Dureza said, the context of his prayer was that it was a light prayer, made at a point in the meeting when there was banter in the room.

“We were bantering, as a matter of fact. It was a light prayer. If (the others) did not get it right, they have no sense of humor,” Dureza was quoted as saying in a statement released today by his office. “We had a good laugh after. But that is my prayer to the Lord. We are too serious sometimes, eh.”

But many are convinced that either it was a Freudian slip or a trial balloon for Arroyo's supposed desire to extend her stay in office.

Let's give Dureza a break, shall we? I know the guy - he is a quick thinker, an astute and very intelligent person who, perhaps because he used to be a journalist himself, knows that words can be taken out of context just like that. Knowing the lingering suspicion among many Filipinos that his boss is harboring term extensions one way or another, Dureza would never have uttered those words if it was not made in jest. He's too smart for that.

A trial balloon? Come now. Look at the immediate reaction to Dureza's prayer from no less than Arroyo herself. It was instinctive, not the kind you would expect to see if she and her press secretary were in on a conspiracy to mislead the journalists covering the meeting.

So again, give Dureza a break.

Having said that, however, Dureza and the president should not have asked the journalists present to consider what just transpired as off the record. It was a pointless (probably even stupid) exercise, tantamount to an attempt to put the toothpaste back into its tube. If anything, that's what made the whole thing eyebrow-raising - the attempt to prevent the journalists to report what just happened, thus giving the impression that Dureza and Arroyo were defensive, that they had something to hide.

Of course, Dureza knew that his words can be used against the president, but if it was just indeed banter, why bother? (In the end, the media did not heed Arroyo's and Dureza's off-the-record plea. Why should they, right?)

It may seem unfortunate that the gaffe involved a press secretary, who speaks for the president. But we should resist the temptation to ask for Dureza's head or wish that Arroyo lob her cellphone at him or chew him out.

Let me explain. Press secretaries are a paradox. They deal with journalists, who demand truth and openness but are often given the opposite. That is particularly true in regimes that thrive on repression and lies. The press secretary's job, therefore, is not to enlighten but to spin, to obfuscate, to point out to you that what you're seeing in front of you is an apple when it's actually an orange.

Ignorance, or not being in the loop, has become a requisite for the job. As Will Bailey, the White House communications director in season seven of The West Wing, exclaimed when confronted with the news that the president's son-in-law was having an affair with a nanny, “I do not need to know that! The less I know, the better.” Or words to that effect.

Plausible deniability is a key part of the press secretary's job. As such, he should be the least informed, not to mention the least loquacious, member of the cabinet. (Ditto with presidential spokespersons. Just ask Lorelie Fajardo. No, don't, because you'll get nothing important from her, which is why she's doing a heckuva job.)

Loose-tongued press secretaries can do the public some good because they tend to be less constrained by the structures of their office. It means that when a journalist pushes the right buttons, the press secretary can speak his mind, in jest or otherwise.

Oops. Did I just give Arroyo a reason to fire Dureza? (Sorry Jess. Trust me, this is all banter.)

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Howie Severino raises an interesting question in his latest blog post: how can a country that supposedly enjoys so much press freedom, such as the Philippines, be so corrupt? Isn't sunshine the best disinfectant? If we are a nation of tattletales, how come many are still stealing and cheating?

Howie cites data that suggest that countries with high press-freedom rankings are less corrupt. The conventional wisdom is that a free and courageous press exposes, thus helps to eliminate, corruption. One of the exception, Howie points out, seems to be the Philippines.

We all have our own theories on why this is so. I'm not about to offer mine, except to point out my disagreement with the premise of this whole democracy-equals-press-freedom thing in the context of the Philippines.

Press freedom, as we all know, does not exist in a vacuum. In a truly functioning democracy, press freedom should flourish. It is a gauge of democracy's efficacy. Without genuine democracy, it would be impossible for press freedom to exist.

The key word in that last sentence is “genuine.”

If we define democracy by its classic meaning -- that people are free to choose their leaders and chart their own political course - then it would seem that what the Philippines have is indeed a democracy.

But Philippine democracy has gone through a lot of permutations ever since the Americans introduced the concept to us more than a century ago. (It was, to be sure, an alien idea, which is probably why for much of the period since then, we were merely experimenting with democracy, not quite sure what to do with it, not quite fully grasping its potential.)

We have been told, since 1986 at least, that a military coup d'etat that is subsequently backed by a throng of people rushing to Edsa is democracy in action. We were told about this again in 2001. Today, we tend to equate democracy in action with the upheavals of a mob - a well-meaning mob, sure, but a mob just the same.

The bastardization of democracy continues to this day. Every election time, we are told that a few select families ruling over us for years and years is democracy in action. An elite political family is good for us, we are told. Political dynasties in the Philippines are the antithesis of democracy and yet we are relentlessly made to accept them as part of our democratic way of life. Never mind that the evidence that elections in the Philippines are far from democratic has always been plain for all to see: the fraud, the vote buying, the violence, the manipulations, to name a few.

The consequence of this bastardization, of course, is the poisoning and emasculation of our democratic institutions. This allows politicians to easily steal elections and make us all believe - through the media -- that that is the work of God.

We have a Commission on Elections that has shown its capacity to be the chief agent not in upholding democracy but in subverting it. We have a judicial system that tends to favor the rich and those in power. We have an executive branch that is populated by a few select families who harbor a sense of entitlement to the positions that they had either stole or bought.

Not surprisingly, we have had a media that, through all these years, has served the cause of the elite, the rich and the powerful more than they do the common man. The Philippine press, with a few exceptions, has not changed since the end of World War II, which is to say that it remains either a weapon or a plaything by those rich or influential enough to literally buy a newspaper or a broadcast network or pay off reporters, editors and news managers.

Filipino journalists work on pittance wages, if at all, making them the most abused of professionals. As such, they are easily corrupted not just by the owners of their newspapers or stations but by those who have the money to buy them and influence how they write or present the news. Again, there are exceptions but these exceptions are not significant enough to empower the press to function properly and professionally.

Perhaps with the exception of the mosquito press during the martial-law years, the Philippine press has never quite shown us why it deserves to be called the “fourth estate,” supposedly a vanguard for the people that would come to democracy's rescue if the other three estates -- the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judiciary -- failed.

So what we have now is a democracy that is not quite the democracy that many of us may have wished for. And what we have is a media that is an outgrowth of this anomaly of democracy, a corrupted and incompetent press so weak it cannot function as the sunshine to disinfect the rot in our system.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Today is World Diabetes Day and I was tempted to write today about my recent discovery that I have the disease, that my blood-sugar level has been shooting through the roof for God knows how long already.

I was tempted, too, to ruminate about the significance of the testimony of Joc-joc Bolante in the Senate and the rise of Barack O'Binay, potentially the Philippines's first black president (so the text joke goes).

But I decided that today is too good a day to ruin. So I'm writing instead about this bit of extremely good news: Miguel Syjuco, a 31-year-old Filipino author who is based in Canada (where he works as a copy editor at a newspaper), has just won this year's Man Asian Literary Prize.

The two-year-old Man Asian Prize is given by the same people behind the Booker -- a fledgling literary award, to be sure, but undoubtedly Asia's most prestigious. The prize, which was given out yesterday in Hongkong, carried a $10,000 award.

Syjuco, who also won the Palanca this year for the novel, was cited for his debut novel, Ilustrado. The judges said of Syjuco's work:

"The shortlist for the Man Asian prize testifies to the great vitality of the novel in Asian societies undergoing hectic and unexpected transformations. In the end, we had to choose; and Ilustrado seems to us to possess formal ambition, linguistic inventiveness and sociopolitical insight in the most satisfying measure. Brilliantly conceived, and stylishly executed, it covers a large and tumultuous historical period with seemingly effortless skill. It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humour."

Adrienne Clarkson, the chairman of the panel of judges, said the vote for Ilustrado was unanimous. “It is very ambitious in what it tried to do, and it succeeded,” she said, according to this report. “The book gathered fragments of reality, poetry and criticism and wove them into a family saga.”

Aside from Syjuco, another Filipino, Alfred “Krip” Yuson, was also on the shortlist this year for his novel The Music Child. The other Asians in the list were Kavery Nambisan (The Story that Must Not be Told), Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay), and Yu Hua (Brothers). Last year, Jose “Butch” Dalisay, was shortlisted for Soledad's Sister.

Most Filipinos may not know Syjuco and the fact that he was shortlisted at all may have stumped some local literary denizens, who sometimes have the tendency to think that the literary world revolves just around them. Here's a few stuff from Danton Remoto's blog, written after Syjuco won the Palanca:

All his life, Miguel Syjuco has dreamt of winning a Palanca Award. And now, the Montreal, Canada-based expatriate Filipino writer has fulfilled his dream and won the much coveted grand prize in the competition's novel category.

His entry was an intricately structured novel which he tried to finish for three years while working full-time as copy editor of Quebec's largest newspaper, The Montreal Gazette.

In an interview before the Palanca awarding ceremonies, Syjuco, who flew in just three days before the Palanca Awards gala night, said, “I value my Palanca award very much. I believe that it is the most important prize I can ever win in the Philippines. I still can't believe it. It is such a pleasant surprise.”

Syjuco spent many years studying literature and creative writing: earning a bachelor's degree in English literature from Ateneo and receiving a master's degree in creative writing from New York's Columbia University and soon a Ph.D. also in English literature from the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has worked in two of the most prestigious magazines in the world, The New Yorker and Esquire.

Aside from being given the opportunity to study and work in prestigious institutions abroad, Syjuco considers himself lucky to have trained under New York-based Jessica Hagedorn (Dogeaters), perhaps the most popular contemporary Filipina author abroad, and, during his college years, under National Artist NVM Gonzalez.

This guy is the future of Philippine literature. As Dalisay says in his blog, Syjuco (and the other Filipinos who've been shortlisted) “already helped put contemporary Filipino writing on the global literary map.”

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Ever since the United States sent their troops to the Philippines in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Filipino people have been fed the line that the Americans are here either to help the people of Mindanao through humanitarian projects or to help train the Philippine military combat terrorism. The US troops have stayed in the country for so long now that not only have we lost count of exactly how many of them have remained – for all practical purposes, the Americans have set up camps in Mindanao. We know so little else about what they do here except some morsels of information contained in the occasional press release from the US embassy about medical missions and such.

Meanwhile, Filipino officials, particularly those belonging to the political opposition, have either lost interest in knowing exactly what the Americans are up to down south or they, too, had bought the line that all those undetermined number of troops, all those millions of dollars spent since 2002, are so the people of Basilan and Sulu can enjoy potable water or have their cleft lip fixed.

There had been assertions, of course, that there’s more to the presence of the US troops in Mindanao than meets the eye. Focus on the Global South, an international NGO, maintained, for instance, that the Americans have been engaged in an “offensive war” in Mindanao. Leftist groups, naturally, have been calling for the US troops’ pullout, particularly after the Americans suddenly sprouted everywhere -- from Basilan, they moved to Sulu then to the Lanao provinces and God knows where else. And the usual line was, of course, they were on humanitarian or medical missions.

Perhaps the first real glimpse of the true nature of the US military’s presence in the south was the mission in 2002 that led to the rescue of Gracia Burnham, the American missionary, who, together with her husband Martin and several others, was kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf in 2001. The group has been linked to al Qaeda.

And today, The New York Times reported that the US military has used, since 2004, a “broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere.”

“These military raids typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.”

The paper also reported about operations that reminded me of Body of Lies, the movie starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo diCaprio that was shown here recently. “In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.”

The New York Times report tells us not to believe whatever the US and the Philippine governments have been telling us since this “war on terror” began. Although the Philippines was not mentioned in the report, it is not difficult to imagine that we are one of the “other countries” where the US had launched these secret attacks.

If anything, this should give politicians a reason to ascertain exactly what the US is doing in Mindanao. As this report indicates, a strong argument can be made that this American presence may have violated Philippine laws.

If the US military can have its way in countries that are less friendly to Washington – Pakistan, for instance – how much more in the Philippines where Americans are given far greater access, whose people bestow on them a tremendous amount of trust that they probably will not find elsewhere?

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.

Is President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo doing a Sarah Palin?

I ask this in light of the insistence by Press Secretary Jesus Dureza that the press conference that was to have taken place last Oct. 2 had to be limited to economic issues and that the members of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (Focap) had to provide in advance the questions to be asked the president.

The Focap, through its president Jason Gutierrez of Agence France-Presse, balked at the preconditions set by Malacanang. Rightly so, I should say.

“The president is the nation's chief political leader and as such the public would be interested in knowing where she is taking the country as well as her initiatives in response to outstanding political issues,” Gutierrez wrote Dureza after Malacanang canceled the event. “As members of the media, we in Focap see our role as the conveyor of the president’s message to the nation, be they political or not.”

Gutierrez added: “As a matter of principle upon which Focap was founded more than 30 years ago under martial law, and as responsible members of the press, we strongly object to being party to any form of media management, prior restraint or censorship. Fencing off certain subjects for discussion with the president does not bode well for press freedom.”

Dureza wrote Gutierrez back to say that Focap had misunderstood Malacanang’s action and that requiring advance questions was not a way to manage or censor the press briefing, as Focap alleged, but so that the president can better prepare her answers.

Then Dureza let on in his letter – almost gleefully, as if to say “Suck on this, Focap!” -- that the president was going to meet with members of the Manila Overseas Press Club on Oct. 3 in a meeting he described as on a “no attribution basis.” (What!? I can talk to the president but I can’t tell people I did? Drat.) Presumably, MOPC agreed to the Palace’s conditions. (I won’t debate how any self-respecting media group would agree to something like this. Then again, the MOPC, in the “about us” section of its website, can’t even get the name right of Carl Mydans, the legendary photojournalist from Life magazine, so there you go.)

Before we go any further, let me point out a couple of things:

1) Malacanang always screens not just the questions to be asked during press conferences with Arroyo but also who can ask the questions. It does this with the MOPC, as well as with the Malacanang press corps and other media groups.

2) Arroyo and the Focap has always had a rocky relationship. Arroyo has always resisted meeting with Focap. She apparently doesn’t enjoy being asked relevant, intelligent questions. In July 2005, Malacanang actually barred Focap members from joining an Arroyo press briefing at the Palace. Earlier, Malacanang had been furious that Focap had invited as guests in its forums mutineers and former Arroyo officials who had become critical of her.

Now back to Sarah Palin.

In case you’ve been livin’ under dem rocks the past two months, she’s the moose-huntin’, straight-talkin’ hockey mom from Wasilla, Alaska, who was handpicked by dat doggone ol’ mav’rick John McCain to be his runnin’ mate in the US elections. (Dat sent everyone ape shit, din’t it?) Dat Sarah girl din’t have nothin’ by way of profound intellect and real political experience (aside from a little mayorin’ here and some governorin’ there) and so the McCain camp thought it was wise to protect her from the likes of Katie Couric, who can ambush her with tough questions, such as what sort of mag’zines and noospapers Sarah reads. (Our gal Sarah, bless her heart, replied, “All of dem!” which floored poor Katie nat’rally because even she can’t get past the advertisements in People mag’zine, no sir.) Dem ‘publicans only want her to talk to jern’lists who can ask only harmless, stoopid questions. And fer good measure, those doggone ‘publicans had insisted she memorized sev’ral talkin’ points. You betcha she drilled-baby-drilled those talkin’ points into her head in time for the debate last Fridey, which many out there in the vast and cold state of Alaska -- where she is an executive of, where Sarah can actually see dem Reds runnin’ ‘round like headless chickens since dey discovered cap’talism – folks ‘cludin’ her huntin’ pal Joe (Sixpack, not Biden) thought she wonned fair and square.

I can understand why the McCain camp did what it did with Sarah Palin. As her interviews with Couric showed, she’s an airhead. A doggone airhead.

But Arroyo? She’s an economist. She taught economics at UP. Her whole political credential revolves around her being adept with economics. She went to the same school as Bill Clinton, for crying out loud! She should be able to parry the toughest questions.

Ah, but the key issue in this mini-flap are not the advance questions. The more important issue is the requirement that the Focap folks cannot ask her political questions. To paraphrase a Focap member who posted his thoughts on the group’s message board, “Excuse me? She’s the president of a country and she doesn’t want political questions?”

(It’s like interviewing Moses and all you are allowed to talk about is his beard. What’s with the stick? “Sorry, can’t go there.” You actually parted the sea with that? “What part of confidential-due-to-biblical-security you don’t understand?” Did you actually talk to God? Why would he disguise himself as a burning bush? “Is your head hard enough to withstand this tablet?”)

We all know, of course, why this is so. As far as Malacanang is concerned, journalists can be pests. They can provoke people -- especially hot-tempered and arrogant people like Arroyo -- into doing something silly during a press briefing, like raising their voice, respond condescendingly to reporters or, heaven forbid, throw a cellphone at one of them.

Or worse, Arroyo can be painted into a corner on questions about her legitimacy and all the scandals facing her and her people.

I actually pity Jess Dureza, who is himself a former journalist. I’m sure he doesn’t want to censor the press (nudge-nudge-wink-wink). But with a boss like Arroyo, the tendency is, apart from simply following her wishes, to try to minimize the damage she could do to herself.

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila. He is a member of Focap.