It began as a minor embarrassment: a lawmaker caught watching chickens kill each other during a session. Probably mistook it for Chiz vs Martin. To be fair that’s how laws get passed.
But the spectacle has spiraled. Now, the real match is against the press, against the public’s right to see what power does when it thinks no one is looking.
On Monday, a photojournalist received a tip. A warning. In hushed tones.
“Shot mo ba yung kay Cong Briones? Heads up lang kita ha. Kase may nagpunta, intel ng Security ng House [of Representatives] kanina sa amin. Kinuha names ng photogs ng DAILY TRIBUNE at The Manila Times.”
The implication is damning. A congressman is exposed and, within days, state resources are purportedly deployed not to investigate misconduct, but to identify the photographers who documented it.
The moment they lost control of the image, they tried to control the journalists. At this point, being a journalist feels like being a criminal.
In the middle of it all? Cong. Nicanor Briones. Maybe he didn’t order the surveillance, but let’s just say if there was a chicken in charge of intel, it’d still report the findings to him.
Briones’ gangster logic thought he was being generous “forgiving” the journalist, right after threatening him with jail time.
Jail. For documenting what happened inside the People’s House. Jail for showing the public how their leaders conduct themselves while in session. Jail for not looking away.
It doesn’t read like a death threat. But it works like one. The target isn’t the journalists; it’s their access, their safety and, eventually, their reason to keep showing up.
Briones claimed he just “opened a link someone sent him,” like walking into a bank with a mask on, then swearing it was a coincidence, is genius-level dumb.
If you can’t tell sabong from state business, what else is this congressman approving on impulse?
He thinks the problem is the video. No, Mr. Briones. The problem is your face in it looking like you just bet your salary on the losing bird.
Very unfair how people are judging the lawmaker for watching cockfights at work. Next thing you know, they’ll ask him to read a bill.
They behave like children, demand to be treated like kings, and then send the guards when someone catches them picking their noses?
The ultimate insult: Briones now proposes a bill banning e-sabong, supposedly to prove his “clear conscience.”
Politicians caught in misconduct draft reactionary bills to simulate virtue. What’s next, Cong. Briones? Stealing pork to outlaw pork? Do you start a fire, then demand to be made a firefighter?
This moment is no longer Briones’ alone. It belongs to the House itself. And they should cluck if it’s true. The institution must answer: did it authorize or allow security personnel to gather journalists’ names without process? Did it deploy its muscle for vengeance?
Because if that’s even close to true, we’ve entered a place where humiliation justifies repression. Where image trumps accountability. Where power protects itself not with better behavior, but with a longer list of enemies.
Briones is a symbol of how far we’ve let mediocrity rot our institutions.
We’ve normalized idiocy. We’ve domesticated outrage. This is what’s most damning, and the fact a lawmaker probably didn’t think it was wrong.