EDITORIAL - Blacklisted

For a democratic country that touts press freedom, journalists find themselves running into all sorts of serious trouble in the Philippines. Local media workers are massacred and buried alive or killed in drive-by shootings. Libel laws are used as tools for harassment, while lawmakers have been kicking around a Freedom of Information bill for a decade.

Foreign journalists, meanwhile, are blacklisted and barred from entering the country for heckling the president of the republic. Malacañang officials initially denied that nine Hong Kong journalists who heckled President Aquino in Bali, Indonesia last year had been banned from the Philippines.

If the denial was sincere, then the Office of the President should find out who thought of the ban and why the Palace was kept in the dark by intelligence and immigration officials. Those officials disclosed that they imposed the ban several months ago as part of security preparations for a regional meeting in Manila last May of the World Economic Forum.

Director Ager Ontog of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, who proposed the ban to Immigration Commissioner Siegfred Mison, recommended its lifting after one of the Hong Kong journalists complained of being barred from covering next year’s summit in Manila of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Palace officials had to clarify that media accreditation for the APEC summit had not yet even started so no one could have been barred from coverage.

That the government actually found it necessary to ban nine journalists for several months, however, speaks volumes about the way the administration regards mass media. There are ways of dealing with heckling of a head of government, without compromising freedom of the press and expression that the land of people power is supposed to uphold.