An oversized book at the office of the global news agency Reuters in the United States capital Washington, DC contains the names of journalists from around the world who were killed in the line of duty.
I first saw the volume in 2014. It was shown by a team led by Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Stella Dawson, who trained several delegates, myself included on reporting land rights issues.
Those pages attest to a bitter irony. Sometimes, the men and women who tell the tales end up being their subjects.
Woeful though understandable. A scribe deployed in a war zone risks being felled by ammunition and killed twice over with sanitizing terminology.
Friendly fire. Collateral damage.
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Accepting that the Philippines ranks among the world’s five worst places for journalists takes a special type of comprehension.
We have no armed conflict of Middle Eastern proportions. Yet according to a tally by scholars Robie and Abcede, at least 211 journalists have been killed in the country from 1986 until March 2015.
In the classrooms of the University of the Philippines Cebu, where we prepare mass communication students for possible careers in journalism, one adage gets told and retold. No story is worth losing your life.
The masterminds of journalist killings, however, go by a different code. Should your pen, rightly or wrongly, drag my name into the mud, consider your life spent.
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President-elect Rodrigo Duterte drew flak for recent remarks justifying the assassination of journalists, particularly if they were corrupt.
His spin doctors tried to say he was taken out of context. To the intellectually honest, however, Duterte’s un-presidential line, that a journalist is “not exempted from assassination if you are a son of a bitch” is pretty straightforward.
The comment drew rebukes from the civilized world, from the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders to no less than Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations.
This week, Reuters released a story titled “After outcry, Philippines’ Duterte says does not condone journalist killings.”
The clarification is necessary. Duterte’s cynical commentary has highlighted a facet of Filipino mob mentality that accuses and convicts without proof.
Those murdered journalists had it coming. They were all corrupt, anyway.
“I do not condone nor tolerate killing of journalists, regardless of the motive of the killers, or the reason for their killing,” Reuters quoted a self-correcting Duterte.
We would be glad to see that verbal erratum made flesh in justice for our slain colleagues.
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