OP-ED: COLUMNISTS: OPINION ON PAGE ONE BY FRANCISCO TATAD – Censuring Trump, silencing Rappler – The Manila Times
FRANCISCO S. TATAD
THE conflict between government and the press is no longer simply about the proper appreciation of the facts on various issues, but rather about who is telling us the truth and who is feeding us with b.s., or fake news.
In the United States, the toxic exchange between the White House and the mainstream media has grown to alarming proportions following President Donald Trump’s alleged profanities against “shithole countries” that have populated the US unwanted immigrants.
In the Philippines, the Duterte government has moved to shut down Rappler, an independent online news platform based in Manila, with a bureau in Jakarta, for allegedly violating the constitutional provision on the ownership and management of mass media.
Trump and the mainstream liberal press have accused each other of peddling fake news, and the toxicity of the exchange threatens to breach the limit of the ethically permissible following Trump’s 90-minute meeting with US congressmen at the White House last week, where he allegedly asked, “why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why not from Norway instead?” He was reportedly referring to Haiti, El Salvador and African countries.
Haiti is one of the world’s poorest countries in the Western hemisphere; it is still recovering from the last deadly earthquake that hit it on January 12, 2010. Norway on the other hand is one of the world’s richest countries, with a GDP per capita of 62,510 PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars in 2017, according to the IMF.
The Times vs Trump
In one of the longest and more trenchant New York Times editorials I have ever read (Donald Trump flushes away America’s reputation, January 13, 2018), this flagship of the world’s liberal establishment press minced no words to show its contempt of Trump. This is an extensive quote:
“Never mind that Norwegians are not clamoring to leave what is rated as the happiest nation on earth, and setting aside questions about Mr. Trump’s fitness, the flip-flop (on immigration) left the issue…more confused than before.
“Where to begin? How about with a simple observation: The President of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin.
“Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history.
“Mr. Trump denied making the remarks on Friday, but Sen. Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who attended the meeting, said the president did in fact say these ‘hate-filled things, and he said them repeatedly.’
“Of course he did. Remember, Mr. Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar…
“The current turmoil over immigration conflates several special issues. One is DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has provided temporary work permits and reprieves from deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. These are the so-called Dreamers who number about 800,000.
“Another issue is the Temporary Protected Status program under which undocumented foreigners who were in the United States when disaster or conflict struck their homeland are allowed to remain in the United States. In November, the Trump administration ended the protection for about 60,000 Haitians, and on Monday the administration lifted it for almost 200,000 Salvadorans, most of whom have been in the United States for two decades.
“A third issue is the future of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants who have come to the United States over decades and have effectively integrated into American life. The Trump administration has ordered a broad immigration crackdown against them.
“And finally there’s President Trump’s imagined wall.
“What is concerning is not the wall, or the word ‘shithole’ or the vacillation on the Dreamers or the Salvadorans. It’s what ties all of these things together: the bigoted worldview of the man behind them.
“Anyone who has followed Mr. Trump over the years knows this. We knew it in the 1970s, when he and his father were twice sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people. We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park. (The men were convicted but later exonerated by DNA and other evidence, but Mr. Trump never apologized, and he continued to argue as late as 2016 that the men were guilty.) We knew it when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims while promoting the lie that America’s first black president wasn’t born here. Or when, last summer, he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as ‘very fine people.’
“Just last month, The Times reported on an Oval Office meeting on immigration during which Mr. Trump said that 15,000 Haitians now living in the United States ‘all have AIDS,’ and that Nigerian immigrants would never ‘go back to their huts’ in Africa once they have seen the United States. See a pattern yet?
“Donald Trump is by no means America’s first racist president. But he ran a campaign explicitly rooted in bigotry, exclusion and white resentment. To his die-hard but ever-shrinking base, comments like those he made on Thursday only reaffirm his solidarity with the cause. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, certainly saw it this way. ‘This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,’ the site wrote in a post.”
The editorial does not end there.
Here we see Trump being pounded to a pulp on the NYT op-ed page. But whatever he may want to do in return, there isn’t very much he can likely do to threaten The Times with possible closure, or any of its editorial writers with possible imprisonment. He, rather than The Times, is on the receiving end. Not so in the case of the Philippines’ Rappler Inc.
The case vs Rappler
The decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission to revoke Rappler’s incorporation papers, for allegedly violating the foreign equity restriction in the ownership and management of mass media—although not yet final and executory, according to SEC spokesman Armand Pan—sends out a most alarming signal not just to the national press, but to Philippine society as a whole.
Rappler is the first Asian website, and the only truly independent news platform operating today in Duterte’s Philippines. It has performed a critical role at a time when the national media, with but a few exceptions, have tended to turn a blind eye on many execrable things happening before their very eyes.
Indeed, the Constitution provides that “ownership and management of mass media shall be limited to citizens of the Philippines, or to corporations, cooperatives or associations, wholly owned and managed by citizens.” But given the cavalier regard the administration has shown for the most sacred constitutional issues, like the separation of powers and the people’s right to choose their own leaders, I suspect not many Filipinos would mind a foreign-owned news platform trying to supply some balance in the lopsided news reporting.
Isn’t this, in fact, the case of all the foreign wire service agencies operating in the Philippines?
But is Rappler, in fact, foreign-owned?
The controversy appears to center on Rappler’s issuance of Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs) to Omidyar Network Fund LLC, a fund created by eBay founder and entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar. A PDR is defined as “a security that grants the holder the right to the delivery of sale of the underlying shares, but not ownership.” Media giants like ABS-CBN and GMA Channel 7 are known to have issued their own PDRs to certain foreign fund providers.
But here’s the rub. In 2015, the PDRs issued by Rappler to Omidyar were approved by the SEC itself, without an iota of suspicion the Constitution was being violated. Has the SEC’s understanding of it changed just because President Duterte ordered Rappler’s true ownership investigated during his last State of the Nation Address?
Assuming the SEC had erred before, and Omidyar PDRs are now to be construed as giving Omidyar ownership or management control of Rappler, wouldn’t it be more fair and just to simply cancel those PDRs, which the SEC itself had erroneously approved, without revoking Rappler’s right to operate its website? After all, why should Rappler be punished for the SEC’s obviously “honest mistake”?
I am assuming, of course, that the silencing of Rappler altogether is not the real non-negotiable official objective of this government move. But is it?
Silencing Rappler solves nothing
I am afraid DU30’s minions might yet succeed in silencing an entity like Rappler, but it would be at the cost of provoking a mighty and extended roar of angry lions from various corners of the world. I personally saw this and had to deal with it for years when Marcos’ martial law silenced the freewheeling national media in 1972; I would not want to see PDU30 inflict the same injury upon himself.
While we are on the subject, a truly sensible and far-seeing move which those seeking to reform the Constitution may want to consider is the scrapping of the present provision barring foreign ownership and/or management of all mass media establishments. This ban serves no useful purpose except to protect the monopolistic interests of media oligarchs who want to use the mass media for their own extractive ends.
The revolution in communications technology, which has given us a digital economy, has abolished all barriers to information from various parts of the world. Through the Internet and television, people of all ages are now able to share knowledge of everything with everyone else. The ban on foreign ownership merely prevents foreign capital and intellectual expertise from entering the country at a time they are sorely needed.
COURTESY:
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