By Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino

Journalists and reporters have jealously guarded their right to keep their sources in confidence. The logic of such a right is not at all complicated. Those who are in the business of providing news and information, and also of contributing to the shaping of public opinion, would soon see their sources running dry were they to be subject to the measures by which the law compels disclosure. Under present laws it is only when the court or a house or a committee of Congress determines the disclosure to be demanded by the security of the State that disclosure can be compelled.

There is a downside to this though, and a very serious one in fact. No matter how important or incriminating the matter may be that one writes about, it hardly helps in the prosecution of offenders or in the resolution of pressing, and sometimes urgent, concerns when one merely writes or reports what he has heard from someone else. This is not only a matter of the niceties of the evidentiary rules? although these are technicalities that do matter. It has to do more basically with what counts as proof or non-proof. Any responsible person who makes a claim guarantees that he is prepared to advance what is acceptable as proof of the claim he makes. If he fails to do so not only is his claim compromised; his credibility suffers a dent?and sometimes an irreparable one?as well. When you announce on national television or print in some broadsheet of general circulation that one prominent figure or the other stole a hefty amount, the assumption is that you are prepared to supply the proof for this claim. That is a demand of intellectual and moral integrity. It is also fundamentally a basic demand of communication. But when all that you can say when you are pressed for proof is that you heard it from someone whose identity you cannot disclose?and who is consequently beyond further examination?then you have put your averment beyond proof or disproof. In fact you have made it effete, flatus vocis the scholastics would say!

The downside to the cause of journalism and reportage is that the discriminating and critical soon develop a justified skepticism in respect to reports especially when they are sensational. The votaries of innuendo and gossip will still lap up every salacious bit, each gory detail, but when credibility is lost, a lot is! The damage obviously to the subjects of supposed exposes need not be belabored. Not knowing the nature of the evidence against them, they are incapable of responding, refuting, testing credibility in any meaningful manner?while the gullible have painted them in their minds in the most awful hues possible. Errata, corrections, retractions and apologies are always late and inadequate, because we have this terrible disposition to believe the worst of others. At a time that journalists and media people lobby for the de-criminalization of libel, I hope they realize why not too many warm up to the idea. Their immunity from prior restraint, the wall of protection that jurisprudence has built around media and the guarantee that they cannot be compelled to disclose their sources make it seem to the public that they already enjoy more than enough protection and that criminal libel is one of the few remaining weapons the hapless victims have against the imprudent and the reckless.

Also, because a report cannot be rebutted by a conscientious and acute cross-examination of the source of a story, the reporter can be lackadaisical in what is supposed to be the demanding task of fact-gathering. Without the possibility of refuting him by his own sources there is hardly anything to stop him from passing over from established fact to allegation, conjecture, or sheer speculation.

Federal Express?s last flight out of the country?also marking the flight of jobs for its former employees?points to another downside in a law, a whole bundle of laws rather, meant to protect the working person. Why did Fed Ex decide to relocate to China? One of the reasons is the high cost of Philippine labor. That is also the reason some other foreign enterprises fold up and leave?seeking other jurisdictions that have less tolerance for labor unrest and are less demanding on employers. I am not by any means saying that the Filipino worker should be beggared, but it is a matter of proverbial wisdom that you never kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

We have enacted an entire code for the protection of the working person? and added to that benefits and even compulsory gifts (we are probably the only jurisdiction that has made gifts compulsory!) with the result that managers have second, even third and fourth thoughts before allowing hired personnel to attain the status of permanence. The point is that when we overdo legislation and regulation for the protection of the laborer, we end up with management fearful and reticent about having employees and resorting to ruses and schemes like ?contractualizing.?

Even our overseas Filipino workers who used to command their wages now face stiff competition from workers of other nationalities willing to accept lower wages. Many have lost their jobs because of demanding too much. While on the one hand, this makes the moral point that the economics of human persons, particularly human labor, cannot be a matter of the law of supply and demand alone, it also underscores the ineluctable fact that wanting inordinately more many times leaves us with an empty basket.

There is a tendency to over-legislate when there is little trust in the enforcement mechanisms of law. But an excess of legislation and regulation may very well result in what one American law professor called ?the death of common sense.? Human life and the co-existence of human persons is such that there can be no pre-determined solution to every problem Laws that attempt to cover every situation to which their provisions are to be applied are many times specimens of disastrous draftsmanship and become tremendous headaches to judges who must apply them.

A final downside I will comment on ?although it deserves a lengthier discussion?is our system of penalties. Our penal code and our hundreds of special laws defining crimes and providing for their penalties are positively meant to establish desirable standards of social interaction and communal life. So we imprison lawbreakers supposedly to vindicate the law. That is the theory. But for all the advances we have made in human understanding and science, it still cannot be shown with satisfactory persuasiveness why incarcerating human beings does society any good at all, except to satisfy the desire of the offended to see the offenders punished. The downside to the supposed system of the vindication of the law and the re-establishment of a ruptured social order is an entire colony?Solzhenitsyn referred to it as an archipelago?of denizens of an ?underworld? that we have conveniently locked behind bars, beyond our everyday perception. The real downside is that our present penal theory and practice do not do justice to our supposed heightened sense of humanity.

rannie_aquino@rannieaquino.com