A FEW days before Panay News founder Danny Fajardo died, he showed me a sheet of paper indicating that he was a respondent of a libel case filed against him by a “drug lord” from San Jose, Antique. The complainant, emboldened by a retired judge as counsel, claimed he had been anonymously alluded to in a column.
Danny shrugged it off as just another “dismissible” case. I believed him because I, too, had been charged with libel countless of times, only to be pronounced “not guilty.”
There was a time, though, when I was not so fortunate in a Roxas City court. But I was still thankful. For “libelling” a former governor in my column, I would not be meted a six-month imprisonment “in case of insolvency.” I opted to pay the penalty of P4,500.
Having paid that, I wrote a column reminding my accuser that I had previously written a favorable story on her for a commendable act. I would not have minded not getting a centavo for that. But to be sued for exposing “malversation of public funds” was demoralizing. I thought I deserved a pat on the back for that.
There was another time, though, to reiterate an unfortunate event I had previously written about, when the late fellow journalist Teddy Sumaray and I spent one night in jail over a libel case that we could have avoided by immediately posting bail. We paid one day later. We wanted the world to know that we were willing to suffer for principle. To us journalists, a libel case is a “medal” of valor.
Scattered all over the world today are thousands of crusading journalists risking lives and limbs in exercising the freedom of the press, as it was long ago on Oct. 7, 1893 when Chicago Evening Post journalist Finley Peter Dunne wrote: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
I remember having met with then congressman Exequiel B. Javier (lone district, Antique) to laud him for authoring a bill seeking to decriminalize the crime of libel, to transform it into a mere civil liability.
Libel – the crime of destroying a person’s reputation by publicity – is hard to prove under Philippine laws because it requires the presence of all four elements: malice, publication, defamation, and identification. Libel law now is used not so much to prosecute but to deter speech.
“In the United States,” Javier told me, “the burden of proof is on the plaintiff who has to prove that an allegation about him is untrue; that it has defamed him; that it has damaged his reputation; and that the author of the story wrote with actual malice, knowing the story to be false at the time of writing.”
Our national heroes had fought for freedom of expression. Jose Rizal did it through his novels “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo”; Graciano Lopez Jaena in the newspaper La Solidaridad, which galvanized a fragmented people and lit up a revolution.
Accuracy, nevertheless, cannot be expected of even the most prestigious journals. In 1983, for instance, Newsweek ran a research story on Adolf Hitler’s “diaries.” Two weeks later, the magazine apologized for relying on fraudulent diaries.
Having been in the journalism profession since 1970 – a period of 48 years – I have waited in vain for a law decriminalizing libel. There have been many bills for that purpose but none has passed into law. Not surprisingly, wayward lawmakers are among the “most favorite victims” of the critical, truthful mighty pen.
Truth hurts. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
