Promises, promises
ONE OF THE few concrete policy promises Ferdinand Marcos Junior made during his campaign for the Presidency of these isles of forgetfulness was to make rice available at Php20.00 per kilo.
ONE OF THE few concrete policy promises Ferdinand Marcos Junior made during his campaign for the Presidency of these isles of forgetfulness was to make rice available at Php20.00 per kilo.
When asked their views on media and press freedom as well as free expression, politicians of the Philippine variety will swear to high heaven their respect for both. But the most clueless among them about what both freedoms mean and what they consist of will do their...
LAST week’s chaos at Afghanistan’s Kabul Airport was somewhat reminiscent of the scene in the former South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) when US troops pulled out in 1975 as the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front (NLF), which the US had derisively labelled the “Vietcong,” took control of the city.
The Philippine experience with elections should have taught everyone by now that voter education is crucial to the present and future of this country.
PRESIDENT RODRIGO DUTERTE’S repeated threats against ABS-CBN are wrong for its pettiness and narrow, self-serving, and vindictive partisanship. But it is equally wrong for its pro-people and anti-oligarchy pretensions. Mr. Duterte did not only shut down the country’s...
COMMUNICATION academics, media advocacy groups, human rights defenders, journalists’ organizations, artists and other professionals, and even some congressmen and senators have condemned the shutdown of ABS-CBN. But national artist for literature F. Sionil Jose is...
A number of media advocacy, human rights and journalists’ organizations, as well as individual journalists and media practitioners and artists, have denounced the shutdown of television and radio network ABS-CBN as an attack on free expression and press freedom, and...
A sovereign citizenry’s right and duty of monitoring and evaluating public issues and problems, and of commenting on them and proposing alternative approaches and solutions, are best served by a free press. But because their hold on power partly depends on being...
TRUTH-telling and accuracy are the fundamental ethical and professional commitments of the alternative press and media in furtherance of the people’s right to know. Truth telling is crucial to the journalistic task of developing among the media audiences the...
AMID great fanfare in 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte signed an administrative order – his first – creating the Presidential Task Force on Media Security (PTFoMS). Mandated to look into and reduce the number if not completely stop the killing of journalists, the task...
MUCH of public and corporate media attention has been focused on the cancellation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the registration of online news site Rappler. But hardly any has been paid to several other cases indicative of the ongoing Duterte...
THE ONE-YEAR extension of martial law in Mindanao was a foregone conclusion. Even the political opposition predicted approval of it because of the overwhelming dominance in both the House of Representatives and the Senate of the allies and party mates of President...
THE phrase "alternative press" gained currency in the last years of the Marcos terror regime, when Jose Burgos' Malaya, We Forum, and other newspapers, magazines and news agencies were published to provide Filipinos and the rest of the world the information about...