In a stunning display of Orwellian ‘doublethink,’” he wrote, “Arroyo wants to convince policymakers that her illegal and unconstitutional suppression of journalists actually serves to preserve the constitution and rule of law.”
And more here from DJB on our new Chief Justice Panganiban's novel (and scary raw, says DJB) ideas about the Judiciary.
After reading Dillon and DJB's piece, ang masasabi ko ay gusto rin yata ng arroyo admin na matulad tayo sa China, that we also have our own "devil's bargain", meaning we sacrifice some of our freedoms (speech, assembly, media) in favor of "economic prosperity".
but the difference between us and china though is that the chinese were coming from somewhere where there was no freedom, and now they're getting a little bit of it.
Sa atin naman, OTOH, the reverse ang nangyayari. gustong ng arroyo admin na unti-unting bawasan ang freedom of speech at gawing less free ang press natin.
From Rebecca Mackinnon on the "Devil's Bargain":
It's certainly true that China's educated urban population have been "bought off" to a large extent, and that includes journalists. When I worked as a correspondent for CNN in China, many of my Chinese journalist friends complained that while they wanted to do real journalism ... there was no incentive to do so. Hard-hitting journalism might make you famous in the short term but would likely get you in trouble eventually -- if not demotion, then possibly jail if you really go too far.
Journalists who do the best financially in China are those who don't bother with sensitive stories and instead take bribes from companies. ... In fact, in the 1990s, bribery ... was so rampant that at corporate press conferences Chinese journalists expected to receive a "little red envelope" in exchange for actually filing a story -- which was often just a rewrite of the press release. My office sometimes got calls from Chinese companies asking how much money we needed in order to do a feature about them. When I explained we don't do that, people were often bewildered.
There is something else going on, however. There is a new phenomenon of online citizens' media. China now has an estimated 15 million blogs. What's important to understand is that many Chinese are willing to accept a fair amount of censorship in exchange for being allowed to do more than was previously possible.
Bloggers get in trouble if they trash their leaders or try to organize a campaign to overthrow government officials. But the conversations are much more wide-ranging, culturally and socially, and much freer than they were 20 years ago. China's most famous blogger writes ... about her sex life. One of China's recent pop heartthrobs is a schoolteacher who rose to fame because so many Internet users downloaded ... an MP3 file he stuck online. The Communist Party is losing control of China's youth culture, thanks to the Internet.
After one of China's most famous bloggers, Michael Anti [Zhao Jing], was censored by MSN Spaces at the end of last year, many bloggers said he was a necessary sacrifice so that the majority of Chinese can continue to have an online space to express themselves as they choose. So the point is, compromises are being made at every level of society because nobody has the expectation of political freedom anyway.
Gosh, I hope we don't end up like repressive China, or buy Arroyo's "logic" that her media crackdown and intimidation tactics were necessary in order to preserve the constitution and "move the country forward."
UPDATE: More from Yan Sham-Shackleton:
In ... Hong Kong, self-censorship is increasing; I see it every day. The reason media outlets are self-censoring is because the bosses [have] business interests in China that need protecting, or [they] want to break into the China market. ... [I]t's a business decision.
UPDATE: We can have economic success without sacrificing our freedoms. FVR has proven that in the mid-90s.
Only corrupt politicians with legitimacy and credibility problems would resort to repressive tactics and accuse critics of being "destabilizers" in order to stifle dissent.
UPDATE: My man Bong Austero speaks for many pro-Arroyo supporters when he said this:
Because quite frankly, we are prepared to lose our freedoms and our rights just to move this country forward.
He said that after Arroyo declared a "State of Emergency" and started cracking down on the media.
Austero may not be the first person to express such views, because we've heard variations of those talking points before from the administration itself, and other pro-Arroyo media surrogates in the MSM and gov't-controlled media. But he's probably the person who became most famous for eloquently expressing such views that resonated deeply among the Arroyo Loyalists and gave the Arroyo admin encouragement to intimidate her critics in the press.
(Of course, later we found out na he didn't really mean what he said. LOL.)
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