THE Department of Justice and the Department of Interior and Local Government, at central office, were of the belief that its future encounters which might turn out like that of the Manila Peninsula would be better off without the media on the spot. If they’re there, they’d be arrested again, an official memo read.

        Collateral damage is one thing; duty is another. Contending parties are entitled to these options, but seemingly, journalists are taking the last and intently finding the warning an incursion to their territory.

        As the administration confidently takes the center beholden to centrist optimism of old that status quo should remain undisturbed while doing their thing, whatever it is, including media to tow the line, it shivers at the predicament, “Not in our watch.”

        They see the matter, gag. So the ll ABS/CBN journalists in the Manila Pen so-called “siege” and the other 29 arrestees and the National Union of Journalists level up at the Supreme Court for the Writ of Amparo.

        What makes the media ready to face the odds can be traced to an international press network through the years, while on leaps and bounds, steadily, is in cognizance of hard-earned status of influence. What can be greater than the truth tooling and retooling criticism against government, institutions, groups, and individuals in pursuit of just cause which evolved from the John Peter Zenger case in the united States in l735 with the remarkable Andrew Hamilton as defense counsel. Would you, being a journalist, lose it in a day, or even your lifetime? I don’t think so.

        “Denial to a journalist access to news is denial to the people who want to know it” is the former’s work credo. Here, attacking it constitutes one over centuries of tradition of the press.

        The right to report is kin to the right to criticize and the right to print. Take out one and there’s no longer the triangle of sacred kinship. And the journalist sees them as offsprings of freedom of the press while being “intertwined” with those of speech, assembly, and petition, all basic freedoms in democracy.

        These must consume the justices in tallying the scores for government and the press.

                                                ***

        Trampling the journalist’s rights aground is no longer juicy to politics in contemporary times exhibiting the libertarian stage. Let’s see this from the experience of the American CBS television reporters when they interviewed Lyndon Johnson when he was no longer president. He told them, “All you guys in the media. All of politics has changed because of you. You’ve broken all the machines and the ties between us in Congress and the city machines. You’ve given us a new kind of people,” in disdain.

                                                ***

        Sen. Jinggoy Estrada wanted the TESDA placed under an existing department after the authority got involved in a corruption mess while Malacañang was sweeping its dirth. His friend Sen. Miguel Zubiri told him to calm down and not to punish the entire agency for the doing of its head.

        In a flashy resto, their usual hangout, they talked.

        Estrada: I want that TESDA dissolved due to that stupid book.

        Zubiri : Why dissolve when you can use it.

        Estrada: What do you mean?

        Zubiri : We tell them to use motion pictures instead of books, your movies and my docu. See, beautiful idea.

        Estrada: But Erap is making movies again. He’ll insist to join. He needs money, umutang na nga sa akin. What about Ate Glo?

        Zubiri : We’ll include them in the movies, the four of us. Our title: Ang Gloria of Erap.