‘Screwing the Fourth Estate’

The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) is courting yet another controversy — this time around it has to do with the Fourth Estate — when overzealous officials decided to “ban” certain reporters from covering their office.

The aforementioned officials must have thought they were doing something good for the agency, but this unilateral move on their part could come back to haunt them as the overarching issue involved is “freedom of the press” which is guaranteed by the 1987 Constitution.

Unfortunately, this seemingly unwise course of action they’ve opted to take comes on the heels of the very public rebuke of the PDEA by no less than President Duterte vis-à-vis its spat with the Bureau of Customs (BoC).

In numerous previous statements played up in various news, radio and television reports, PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino blamed unnamed corrupt persons at the BoC in cahoots with drug lords for the spiriting out of P6.8 billion worth of shabu which supposedly arrived in the country early August concealed inside four magnetic lifters.

But in a speech at Malacañang, Mr. Duterte branded Aquino’s disparaging views as “pure speculation” and admonished him against speaking prematurely considering that not one gram of the alleged shabu load was recovered and that swab tests conducted by the Philippine National Police crime laboratory, the Customs’ anti-narcotics unit as well the PDEA’s own chemists yielded negative results for the presence of drugs.

During a hearing of the House Committee on Dangerous Drugs, not a few congressmen demanded the PDEA recant its previous statements to the media as this is simply misinformation on its part, since there is no “body of the crime” to show to the judge and the case would just be junked.

It turns out, as admitted to the committee by Deputy Chief Ruel Lasala who was subbing for his boss who was in the US with his family for an extended summer vacation, the PDEA was only relying on circumstantial evidence provided by K9 drug-sniffing dogs to indicate the lifters had been used in the shabu smuggling caper.

From what we gathered, some reporters incurred the ire of PDEA bigwigs for their stories on the P6.8-billion shabu smuggling issue which put the organization in a bad light and caused them a great deal of embarrassment at Malacañang and the House of Representatives.

Obviously out of spite, the public information office (PIO) unceremoniously delisted media men who were critical of the agency from the official media advisory and coordination channel which was described as a brazen attempt to apply sweet-scented perfume to news stories flowing from the PDEA.

The PDEA-PIO’s hatchet job on “unfriendly” reporters is similar to the action taken by the White House press office in excluding some correspondents of The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN whose steady stream of dispatches was perceived as anti-Donald Trump, from attending the open news conferences of the American Chief Executive.

President Trump has reportedly long been peeved with some segments of the US press, branding them as purveyors of “fake news” for coming out with unflattering news accounts about him, his actions and his policies.

Someone should remind the clueless PDEA-PIO about Article III Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution which guarantees freedom of speech, of expression and freedom of the press and, above all, who pays for his salary.