Appearing in The Gardener’s Tales is our guest tiller: Kit Tatad. We give him this post for his last column…
Goodbye to The Times!
This is my last column for The Manila Times.
After several years of delivering this column to my readers around the world three times a week, I have been told by the “owners” of the Times this should be my last. It is both a relief and an outrage. At 79, my eyesight has begun to blur, and my advancing years have begun to tell on my creative faculties; I am tired. But more than the wear and tear which physical labor has inflicted upon my mortal frame, the events of the last few days have drained me of so much energy and strength. They have touched me to the core. Guided by the noblest motives, a pure conscience, a firm grasp of the Constitution and the canons of journalism, I had sought to report on the President’s state of health, as duty dictated, following his unexplained disappearance from public view for a number of days.
I treated my findings with utmost respect, injecting no political opinion into my report. For an entire week, I heard nothing from anybody in government. Then the explosion came. In a public speech in Bulacan, the President threatened to slap me, if ever we met, and threatened to violate my wife’s honor too, because of what, he said, I wrote. He accused me of suggesting he had cancer, even though nowhere in my column did I ever suggest he was suffering from that dreaded disease. I had written in the past that his occasional bouts of dizziness had raised certain questions about his health; but he alone, not anybody else, has talked about his various ailments. It was he who told the nation he had been taking fentanyl, which subsequent reports have described as a dangerous drug.
The President’s health is a matter of vital interest to the nation, and I have written about it purely out of duty as a journalist, never out of malice. So when I heard that he blew his top over what I was supposed to have written, I invited him to read carefully everything I have in fact written, so that he could see I had never disrespected his person, and never treated any of his alleged health issues as a character or moral defect. But he ignored my invitation, and continued to attack my person without restraint. This happened at the hustings where he was campaigning for his senatorial candidates.
With RAM and Guardians
Then on February 25, according to highly reliable sources, I once again became the principal object of hate speech at a Malacanang dinner for some 250 members of RAM and Guardians, two military-related groups. At such dinner, the President reportedly turned his fury on his usual anti-drug war-critics and the bishops and priests whom Manila’s cardinal archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle had earlier reported, in a text message from Rome, to have complained about death threats from “someone claiming to be working for the President’s family.” Yet for the greater part of three hours he talked of nothing and nobody but Tatad, the sources said.
There was a moment during that dinner when the guests waited for the President to “give them their marching orders” against his perceived enemies. No orders came, so some of those who listened to him could not decide whether or not the President was suggesting that they initiate their own military activity against their common enemies. Yet the “owners” of the Times knew what would please the President.
Among the Times columnists, I represent a minority view, and that view grates in the ear of the President. Shouldn’t I then be suppressed and silenced in favor of the many who sing hymns and burn incense for the President? The philosopher John Stuart Mill would say no—- “if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
But John Stuart Mill lived in another age (1806-1873), and the “owners” of the Times may or may not have heard of him. They may not even be fully aware of a newspaper’s raison d’etre (reason for being). So instead of denouncing the clear assault on press freedom and defending its intended victim, the “owners” of the Times decided to resolve the issue in favor of the assailant. Tatad has to stop writing his column. Not because he has been writing lies, libelous or seditious materials, but because he has offended the President.
The worst censorship
This is where we are. It is censorship of the worst kind, the biggest blow to press freedom, coming down from the highest political power in the land, and facilitated by the very newspaper that was supposed to oppose it and fight for the rights of its intended victim. The Times claims, on its front page: “Trusted since 1898.” Can it still make such claim after suppressing an honestly independent writer just to please an uncontrollably angry president? First of all, is any newspaper, or any person for that matter, obliged to listen to anybody who has completely lost his self-control?
Censorship, as we have seen, refers to the suppression of printed matter, usually by a totalitarian state, as a projection of its power. In ancient Greece and Rome, blasphemous books were burnt, and their authors punished, but only after their production, Wikipedia points out, not prior to it. In John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), the English scholar and poet argued that a work should be “examined, refuted and condemned” after publication rather than prohibited before examination.
In my case, nothing I have written has been censored or banned. But I have become a source of continuing irritation to the President, so I have to be censored and banned. Not any particular work of mine, but the very act of myself writing anything for anyone who may have followed my work all these years. It is akin to the time in England (1643) when Parliament required authors to have a license approved by the government before their work could be published. Or akin to the situation of the writer in some gulag in the Soviet Union.
No room for conversion
In exercising this particular “censorship” the “owners” of the Times completely foreclosed the possibility that one day pigs could fly, and everyone could be writing favorably about DU30, because he has stopped the drug killings, stopped blaspheming God, stopped disrespecting women, stopped being a bad example to children, and even begun to fight for the Philippine territorial claim in the Spratlys against the Chinese government. This censorship leaves no room for converting into DU30’s camp.
Despite my doubts about the propriety of the Times’ chairman emeritus Dr. Dante Ang hiring himself as DU30’s “special envoy for international publicity”, and public relations consultant to the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Organization (PCSO) and the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR), I was hoping he could help bridge the gap between the President and his critics, which is so necessary in running a government based on truth, reason, justice and the rule of law.
I saw this done during the ten years I served as Marcos’s press secretary, presidential spokesman and information minister (from 1969 to 1980). I have always thought it necessary and doable. But I don’t believe it has been tried in this administration.
Libertarian tradition
Dr. Ang now “owns” The Times. He also runs a journalism school and a TV operation. These could be the modest beginning of a small media empire. But he has a duty to live up to the Times’ great libertarian tradition and rise beyond its past achievements for press freedom. He must defend the rights and dignity of the free press with his blood, if needs be, rather than submit to the biggest bully that comes around. He cannot allow himself to be terrorized into sacrificing any of the paper’s writers to authoritarian power, just because they will not sing with the “owners’ choir.”
Ferdinand Marcos at the height of his power never asked any newspaper publisher or editor to throw any writer under the bus just because their opinions had become personally unbearable to him. After I resigned from the Cabinet and returned to journalism in 1980, I exposed Marcos’s secret kidney transplants in 1983 and 1984. But the President never took it against me. He knew it was my job as a journalist to expose secrets, and he knew I was good at what I did.
In November 1985, after Marcos announced on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley” that he was calling a snap presidential election in a couple of months, he invited me to a private meeting in his study, after office hours, just to ask me what I thought of his decision. I told him the stage was being set for his graceful exit, and that he should prepare for it. He did not agree with what I said, but he knew I always spoke my mind, and he did not take it against me. History proved me right, and we had time to revisit the point when I visited him in 1987 in his place of exile in Makiki, Hawaii.
Where’s Chino?
One cannot talk of the Times and its illustrious history without talking of its longtime publisher Chino Roces. He was a great patriarch of Philippine journalism, an unrelenting fighter for press freedom. One can never imagine Chino Roces sacrificing any of his writers to state authority, just because they had begun to “annoy” a powerful president. Unhappily, not Dr. Ang. It appears he has decided to act more as a loyal DU30 ward than as the “owner” of a once-truly great newspaper. Fewer things could be as tragic, humanly degrading, and shameful.
IN MEMORIAM.
ENRIQUE “POCHOLO” ROMUALDEZ, EDITOR, 92
MALAYA Executive Editor Enrique “Pocholo” Romualdez died in the peace of Christ last Wednesday, Feb 27, 2019, at the Medical Center Manila, at the age of 92. He will be long remembered by his family and friends as a truly kind person, a devout Catholic Christian, and one of the most accomplished and well-loved newspaper editors of his time. His remains lie in state at Alphonsus Chapel 3 in Magallanes Village, Makati and will be buried on Wednesday. Please join me in offering a prayer for the eternal repose of his soul. Thank you.
fstatad@gmail.com