Getting the story is now the story

Maybe it is not really the intention of Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama to "gag" department heads at City Hall and make them inaccessible to media. Maybe he simply wants to make sure his first months in office do not get mired in controversy, especially those not of his own making.

 If Rama seems overly protective of his tenure, remember that the road to his becoming mayor had not been easy. The price Rama paid to get to the top was so terrible most men could only shudder to think of the cost.

The humiliation Rama has had to endure from his predecessor just to get his political blessings has become a classic tale of abuse. And now that he has what he gave more than an arm and a leg for, it is unfair to begrudge his defensiveness of his turf.

One cannot fairly and truthfully accuse Rama of shutting out the media from opportunities to access information about City Hall because he himself remains accessible. Now, if he cannot adequately and effectively speak for all City Hall departments, then that is his own lookout.

Maybe the problem lies with a media grown dependent on what is easy and convenient, a media that quickly gets LBM at every unexpected turn of the straight and narrow, a media that never had the opportunity to learn that real, hard-nosed journalism is never a walk in the park.

Great journalists never built illustrious careers on convenient interviews and press conferences. Whining never gets a journalist worth his salt his story. When the front door slams shut on his face, the journalist who knows his way knows the way to the backdoor.

Rama himself has denied having issued the "gag" order and explained what he really wanted to happen. But feathers have already been ruffled. Onion skins that turned out thinner than that of government officials have been pricked. So his explanation fell on deaf ears.

It was even attempted to bring Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal into the picture, just so the issue would have some sort of moral dimension. But nothing can be more immoral than to deliberately have only one side of the conflict prevail.

 I have very strong feelings about my rights as a journalist, but imposing my will over the rights of others is not one of them. Press freedom is not a formula meant to render anyone, including government, so defenseless that they cannot even make rules for themselves.

The way I understand an assault on press freedom is that it has to be systematic and sweeping, that legitimate demands for access to information and their free airing thereof are denied in such a scale that there can be no doubt as to freedom's demise.

But if an entity, such as City Hall, tries to impose certain regulations to govern how it operates within its premises, I do not think the fruits of democracy are undermined by them in any way. On the contrary, such is the way true democracy flowers and blooms.

Rama trying to define the system by which the flow of information at City Hall can be harnessed and accessed is different from Rama decreeing that no information whatsoever must be made available to media. The latter is a "gag" while the former is not.

Tomas Osmeña, the predecessor of Rama, was such a character that he often refuses to talk to The Freeman simply because he hates the brother of the paper's owner. But The Freeman never complained. It simply got the story somewhere else.

In the United States, considered as the bastion of the "free world," a press card is not as high and mighty as some would like to believe. It cannot empower anyone to barge in uninvited anywhere, including government buildings and offices. Do that and you invite a felony rap.

That is because even though a government that is "of the people, for the people and by the people" suggests openness, it does not deprive that government of the right to be secure and systematic in its affairs. And even the powerful media recognizes and respects that. Except here.