Legal deterrents have been installed precisely to prevent a repeat of the Marcos experience, and Duterte has yet to be able to go past them. To be sure, he’s been trying to go around them by coopting counterweight institutions like Congress and the courts. In the meantime, it seems to suit him to do his murder piecemeal (except in his properly declared war on drugs), to choose his targets, to pick on Rappler and Ressa.
Being the mere lesser half of the evil genius that Marcos was and being indeed a certified narcissist, with only his ego to serve, how can Duterte be expected to grasp, let alone grant, the principle of press freedom?
Press freedom may only derive from the more general one of freedom of expression, but, because of its institutional nature, it has a practical primacy over the other. It is relied upon not only to facilitate the search for truth but, by some process of distillation, to sort through the controversies attending that search. The intent is to afford the individual beneficiaries of the freedom of expression, the citizens themselves, a more or less informed mind before they even attempt to speak or act it.
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