Dear PJ

PARDON, Pablo John F. Garcia, representative of Cebu’s Third District, head of the Technical Working Group (TWG) recommending denial of the franchise application of the ABS-CBN Corporation, and one of the 70 members of Congress (#28) who blocked the network from using a frequency in the country’s broadcast spectrum for 25 years anew.

Once I walked with you as a “kauban” during a 1980s rally of workers and tricycle drivers in Mandaue. While distributing leaflets, I reread the manifesto and wondered: what if you had written that tract, slashed out the polysyllabic words, and rendered the substance spare, vivid, pellucid?

For I know you better through your writing. As columnists, we laid our infants—my younger son and your first-born—with the other newsroom babies photographed lying on a conference room table in 1998, the launching of “Cebu Daily News”. Your irreverent column was a favorite in the daily that challenged the two-corned competition between the two English papers in Cebu.

Writing grows with the writer. Since you graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) - Cebu High School with a Gold Medal for Journalism and became editor-in-chief of “The Philippine Collegian” while studying at the UP College of Law (fourth-placer in the 1993 Philippine Bar Exam), the years honed your pen.

Acuity, parsimony. A phrase you wrote could cut when a lesser writer would need a page to inflict a graze on repute. As the blogger Onion-skinned, you skewered in your exposés of Cebu media. Was it then that unease crept like a slug because these journalists were critical of Cebu governor Gwen Garcia, your sister?

Your sting as a gadfly of media rests on a deep familiarity with the workings of the press. So I wonder why, after rereading the 40-page TWG report, I could not find a mention of at least one merit of the ABS-CBN company: it brought essential information to a public.

Public service without the office. As you emailed me on Aug. 2, 2014 for an interview I requested for my graduate thesis: “people rely upon journalists for their information… even in the shaping of their views.”

So it is that the TWG report rife with the demerits of an applicant seeking the “privilege” of broadcast frequency stands out in my mind not for the 40 pages of legalese or for that telling phrase—“this matter is in no way related to the freedom of the press”—but for an absence as palpating as silence.

What you wrote of the blogosphere in your August 2014 email ricochets: “There are relationships involved in every ecosystem, so it's essential to point out what these relationships are. And to remember always that, like every ecosystem, it also generates its own trash.”



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 19, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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”