Hardly had the ink dried on the signatures of the Supreme Court justices en banc in the recent (November 2023) landmark case of Ong v. Pharmally (where I've heard that the counsel for the winning petitioner Ong is a man oozing with sex appeal) where the High Tribunal scolded the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee then headed by Dick Gordon for violating the rights of the petitioners whom the committee sent to jail for contempt, that the Committee on Franchises of the House of Representatives took into custody broadcast journalists Eric Celiz and Lorraine Badoy of SMNI for the same reason: Supposed contempt of the committee.

In the case of Celiz and Badoy, they refused to answer the question of the honorable congressmen as to the identity of their informant, a Senate employee who told the newsmen in confidence that Speaker Martin Romualdez purportedly spent a whopping P1.8 BILLION for various travels.

Some members of the Lower House, upon hearing this, were fit to be tied. Shouting "disinformation," they summoned the two to appear before the aforementioned committee with a not-so-veiled threat of cancelling SMNI's franchise, a threat made more openly after Celiz figured in a heated verbal tussle with some committee members.        

Celiz and Badoy, of course, invoked the Sotto Law, a vintage 1946 legislation that protects bona fide members of print media by giving them the right NOT to disclose their sources, a principle in journalism that predates any law and is considered one of the sacrosanct rules of the fourth estate.

The said law (also known as the Shield Law) has recently been updated to include broadcast and social media, a nod to the rapidly changing sources of information today.

Perhaps realizing that they were standing on legal quicksand, some House members — notably one Johnny Pimentel — went to town claiming that Celiz and Badoy could not hide behind the protective mantle of the Sotto Law. Pimentel focused on one word in the law: "accredited." He reasoned that the entity that is supposed to "accredit" a media person in order for him to be able to brandish the Shield Law is none other than the KBP — the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas. That argument is beyond ridicule.

For one, there is absolutely nothing in the law to support that view. One hornbook principle in legal hermeneutics is that of mens legislatoris, i.e. in ascertaining the meaning of the law, one must delve into the will of the lawmaker.

Since the law was written in 1946, there was no KBP at the time, so that accreditation could not have been what the lawmakers required. But more than that, the KBP is a private VOLUNTARY organization. To make the protection of any law potestative on recognition of a third-party non-governmental entity would not only be violative of the right of freedom of association, but would also be an undue and impermissible delegation of legislative powers. Both are UNCONSTITUTIONAL. 

It is clear from the plain language of the law that the credentials required for the armor of the law to come into play is that given by the media organization concerned to which the journalist claims to belong, and not any other.

But what is more alarming than such a perverse interpretation of the law is the relative inaction of many self-proclaimed champions of press freedom in the case of Celiz and Badoy. Quick to make noise in every case of supposed stifling of press freedom when the "victim" comes from their camp, they are eerily silent in the case of SMNI and its people. It has become a disturbing case of "well it's you, not us."

In short, a hypocritical sotto voce that exposes these so-called activists not as men and women of principle, but of pure partisan politics.