The Agony and Crucifixion of Jarius Bondoc

Apparently, there is unanimity in anonymity, at least among some journalists in the Phlippines. (According to an obscure theorem in set theory, one can always find a set small enough to discover homogeneity.) In The Big Picture last Thursday, Ricky Carandang featured an exclusive with Jarius Bondoc, followed by a forum with Juliet Javellana and John Nery of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Vergel Santos of Business Day. At first, they all said they had no right to pass moral judgment on Bondoc for ‘ratting’ on Romulo Neri in the NBN scandal. Then. near the end of the show, they all agreed that what Bondoc did was ‘unethical.’ They would not do what he did, they said self-righteously and apparently satisfied with themselves.

So a fine thin line must be drawn between ethics and morality. Where that line is and with what pen it is drawn escapes me, and probably all the rest of you not familiar with the workings of the press, whether in the Philippines and elsewhere, populated in the main by innumerate high school graduates accepted by journalism departments teaching kids arithmetic and algebra are instruments of repression.

I do not contest the assertion that, owing to special circumstances, some news sources need to have their identities protected. Especially if their ‘outing’ would threaten their physical survival. What I’m uncomfortable with is that continued institutional protection of anonymity encourages cowardice and fiction in newspapers. I think that if we phase out that protection, we will eventually be braver and stop tolerating scandalous behavior.

Let me mention three cases, if memory serves.

The first, on a Dr. Kelly, one of the weapons inspectors in Iraq before the invasion. A BBC radio reporter was fired after it was determined that he molested and abused the facts and his notebook in his story on Kelly, who lent credence to suspicions that the alleged threat was ‘sexed up.”

The second, Deep Throat, in the Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. The sore throat’s family eventually decided to identify him. In that case, however, Woodward and Bernstein had other sources whom they followed up from the Throat’s leads.

And there is a third instance, one that Carandang mentioned in his program but of which he had no clear grasp. An American woman reporter (J. Miller) was ordered by a court to identify her source on the ‘outing’ of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband had earlier been sent to Niger and whose report dismissed or dissed reports of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. She was detained for contempt but was eventually released. (Scooter Libby was convicted by the court but was pardoned by George W.).

I’m trying to recall a lesson on the vision and aspirations of my favorite philosopher. He said that if we value our humanity, we have to reclaim our ‘wholeness’ and integrity. If we continue with specialization as capitalism suggests, we will eventually end up being mushrooms, believing wholeness and integrity are concepts alien to the other. That to me is The Real Picture, big and small.