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“Information is the currency of democracy,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote. So, are we going broke? Screws on the press tighten all around us.
Even during the successful Olympics, China “firewalled” dissent on Internet. In Burma, the daily Myanmar A-Lin (“New Light of Myanmar”) is a servile mouthpiece for the paranoid junta. The 14 other newspapers play “safe” by focusing on football. When state radio and TV mention Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, it is to smear probably the world’s best-known political prisoner.
In Thailand, the 2006 coup against Thaksin Shinawatra aborted growing freedom of media. Bangkok’s long history of censorship is intertwined with tough lese majeste laws. Papers today are censored. Reports by BBC, CNN, The Economist, etc. are spiked. Since last year, the number of websites that government blocked quintupled.
Malaysia arrested the influential blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin under the Internal Security Act. A floundering regime didn’t detain him for linking Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak to a Mongolian model’s murder or terrorism. (Najib washed his hands.) Petra’s lockup came for “a blasphemous article about Islam.”
Under tough license curbs, Kuala Lumpur’s press self-censors with zeal.
“There’ve been no restrictions online so far,” BBC reports. But Petra’s arrest signals that Internet’s “free-for-all is about to end…. A wider crackdown is feared.”
Is the Philippines flush with “Jeffersonian currency”? Screaming headlines and newscasts give that impression. But don’t be conned.
The Arroyo regime systematically crimps the flow of information, from the “Garci tapes,” to the broadband scam, to the aborted Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain. Trivia handcuffs media as Marcos’ padlocks did. Pack reporting and ATM journalism, sweeping in even entertainment writers, result in tough questions rarely being asked, blogs claim. The result is a society swamped with comment but starved for knowledge.
Asean countries stitched press freedom provisions into their constitutions. We went further. Seared by Marcos’ suppression, delegates broadened the Constitution’s bar against laws abridging liberty of expression. They added access to official records crucial to public welfare and interest.
“The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal,” Albert Einstein cautions. What the Constitution grants, practice here takes away. Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism wrote 46 letters of inquiry on the $329-million broadband scandal to 15 agencies. PCIJ made 190 follow-up calls. Result: 35 percent were denied or simply ignored.
It’s been “almost 20 years from birth of the 1987 Constitution,” the Supreme Court noted in Chavez vs. NHA decision. “(But) there is still no enabling law that provides the mechanics for the compulsory duty of government agencies to disclose information on government transactions.”
Timelines can provide context. President Lyndon Johnson signed the United States Freedom of Information (FoI) Act in 1996. Sweden, however, enacted the first FoI in the world back in 1776. Over the years, these laws invariably backed disclosure in challenges.
Quezon Representative Lorenzo “Erin” Tañada III, meanwhile, got the House of Representatives to approve an FoI act. That was no mean feat. He got prickly colleagues to cooperate in consolidating nine similar bills into HB 3732.
The approved bill narrows the kind of records that may be kept secret, (e.g. national security, foreign negotiations, etc.). It spells out uniform procedures for information release. The current murky system permits bureaucrats to stonewall against media. They simply acknowledge requests – period.
Corruption thrives in secrecy. Hence, “there’s a penalty for ignorance. We pay through the nose.” Sleaze guesstimates are mind-boggling. The World Bank’s 2008 Worldwide Governance Indicators found the Philippines as tenth among 10 of East Asia’s largest economies in battling graft.
HB 3732 stipulates that public officers and private persons who block access to policy data could be jailed from six months to a year. There are fines too. The guilty pay P1,000 daily, starting from denial until the request is complied with.
Since House approval in May, HB 3732 has gathered dust in the Senate Committee on Public Information. Is this the “Mona Lisa treatment”? The measure may just “lie there and will die there.”
Senator Ramon Revilla Jr. heads this vital committee. Industry, alas, is not one of his strengths. He has already scrubbed three hearings on the FoI on short notice. Reason: committee failure to study HB 3732. “Hard work never killed anybody,” Ronald Reagan once cracked. “But why take the chance?”
Because of committee paralysis, Senate President Manuel Villar’s counterpart measure molders. Significant provisions of SB 1578 – declassification after five years and waiver of fees for documents – have been given short shrift.
Revilla is not in the league of a Claro Recto, Emmanuel Pelaez or Jovito Salonga. More reason that he apply himself to critical issues lodged with his committee. Economies today pivot around information – a resource that is both renewable and self-generating.
