The law against libel has been in the books for a century and a quarter now, but its weaponization by public officials and politicians against the press did not become a standard form of harassment until perhaps a generation or so ago.
I can more or less account firsthand, as a press practitioner myself at the time, for how it was in the last two generations, skipping, of course, Ferdinand Marcos’ 14-year dictatorship, during which there was no free press — anyone who took risks answered to his censors, not to any democratic law. And for the prior contemporary years, I can speak from observations by elders who came before me in the profession. Until Marcos, libel was scarcely an issue, and, offhand, I can think of two reasons:
One, as a law that punishes the offense with imprisonment, it worked fairly effectively by simply being there, a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of journalists. Two, the relationship between the people in power and the press was reasonable enough: most of the time, if not nearly all the time, one side tended to concede to the other, and in that way litigation was avoided.
That arrangement had held until Marcos declared Martial Law, in 1972, on the pretext that the communists posed an imminent existential danger to the nation. His faked emergency actually looked directed more against the press. He had been having a bad press, and a bad press across the board, as in his case, can only imply a subject who deserves it, rather than a press that is out of line. In fact, two publishers and three journalists were among the nine arrested in the first Martial-Law roundup — the four others were politicians.
A similarly implausible case of press conspiracy was raised by former President Gloria Arroyo’s husband, Mike: during her term, he took 46 journalists and publishers to court, although he withdrew his suits in the end. Conspiracy simply does not suit the press, for, by nature, its component member practitioners and organizations are professional and business competitors.
After Marcos was deposed in a People Power street rising, in 1986, libel became increasingly a weapon of choice among local officials. That was especially true in provincial parts where the press had little resources, let alone for litigation, therefore had no taste for it, thus preferring to err on the side of caution. While perfectly understandable, such an attitude constitutes a retreat from the bold stance the press, as the constitutionally designated watchdog on official wrongdoing, is expected to take.
Still, a libel suit was a far more benign form of reprisal than silencing the press with threats of, or actual, physical harm. Assassinations were in fact not unheard of — more than 200 workers in the news profession have been killed in the post-Marcos years.
Such draconian options may have been a carryover from Martial Law, with some holdouts simply unable to come to terms with the newly liberated press. The situation reached horrific heights in the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022), himself an openly proud Marcos idolater. Around 20 news practitioners were murdered in his time, although none of those murders were linked to his regime other than, perhaps, by inspiration, if at all.
Against the press, libel and other types of legal suits were more Duterte’s thing — murder he reserved for his war on drugs. And it suited him particularly that, four years before he took office, a law against cyberlibel had been passed. Of the 3,700 cyberlibel cases filed from the time the law came into force until the end of the Duterte presidency, hardly half of one percent, or fewer than 20, resulted in conviction.
The suits filed in Duterte’s time were notably scandalous. Several of them represented a fulfillment of his repeated warnings of vengeance against one news organization — this very news site. In each case, Maria Ressa, Rappler co-founder and CEO (now Peace Nobel laureate), was named in the warrant of arrest. All suits have ended in acquittal, except one, for cyberlibel, which is still pending on appeal in the Supreme Court.
Libel has now re-emerged as an issue with the arrest last month of Philip Lustre Jr., columnist and author. The harassment bears the Duterte mark too. The case, also for cyberlibel, was filed by Rodrigo Duterte’s son-in-law, Manases Carpio, husband of his daughter Sara, the vice president, herself on trial now before an impeachment court for unexplained wealth that documents show to be conjugally owned.
Carpio claims a “defamed…reputation,” which recalls an exchange I had with Raul Pangalangan some time ago. At the time, Pangalangan had just been named publisher of the daily Inquirer, long before he became an International Criminal Court judge; he is retired now.
I suggested to him that I thought the first thing libel accusers ought to prove was their own “ruinable reputation” — “defamable” in Carpio’s case. He neither shot down or embraced the idea. But it should be a much easier sell now, given the extent of the decline in the moral quality of the political class, in whose hands libel has traditionally found trigger-happy fingers.
For now, in any case, the press should feel some relief if libel were decriminalized, the imprisonment provision dropped. That is only fair, indeed fair more than ever, considering that the very people deserving to be called out for wrongdoing have become so entrenched in power and wealth that what oversight power the press has been left with, after its progressive weakening by the weaponization of the law of libel, may have been decidedly blunted. – Rappler.com