Hold the line

THERE is only one Maria Ressa.

That she posted bail last Valentine’s Day after her arrest the day before on charges of cyber libel speaks loud and clear for those of us who are NOT Maria Ressa.

The chief executive officer of the news website Rappler received the 2017 Democracy Award given by the National Democratic Institute and the 2018 Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers.

She was one of “The Guardians,” journalists fighting the global “War on Truth,” named by the international newsmagazine “Time” as its “Person of the Year 2018”.

Malacañang has denied it is applying political harassment against Ressa and Rappler, vocal critics of the Duterte administration. It has accused Ressa of “weaponizing” the issue of press freedom to attack government and escape accountability.

“Weaponizing” is a neologism referring to how something previously unconnected to warfare—like information, the Law or freedom of expression—is converted into a tool for attacking or defending oneself against an enemy.

In the age of disinformation, bodies and bloodbaths are replaced by doubts sown, credibilities destroyed, and political will diluted.

Political liquidation was first raised into a cottage industry during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. With our country being the most dangerous in Southeast Asia to practice journalism—as tallied in 2017 by the International Press Institute—this administration may yet elevate impunity against the press by turning a top-drawer journalist like Ressa into something more useful than a statistic: the weaponizing of permissibility.

One doesn’t require permission to express views. One thinks one doesn’t require permission. One does.

Martial law in 1972 created this leap in the progression of the freedom of expression. No one spoke what was on their mind. Too many people disappearing; too many bodies reduced to litter.

By the 1980s, the quality of air had improved but the lesson was learnt. The first gatekeeper of information are not the censors nor the liquidators: it is the person with a thought.

Noting how public executions faded by the nineteenth century, Michel Foucault wrote that state power brought about the “age of sobriety in punishment”.

Torture took a bloody long time. Horses tied to tear a man limb by limb were prone to panic. How can the punishment of rule-breakers be made more edifying for the public?

“Since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul,” wrote Foucault. “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”

Ressa, weaponized by an onion-skinned administration, appealed to those who love this country: “hold the line”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 17, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”