EYE ON ETHICS

Should journalists heed authorities’ request to leave the scene of an unfolding news event, or should they stay? Which should take precedence for journalists, the presumably lawful orders of the authorities, or the public’s right to information? These are among the questions now being debated among journalists and journalists’ groups in the Philippines in the wake of a November 29 incident in which dozens of journalists were arrested for ignoring police requests to leave the scene.

The incident

The usually busy lanes of a street leading to the Manila Peninsula Hotel in the central business district of Makati were suddenly empty at around noon of November 29, save for Philippine senator and former Navy officer Antonio Trillanes, several civilians including former vice president Teofisto Guingona , and a number of soldiers carrying long firearms. The group was marching towards the Hotel. They were accompanied by an equally large group of journalists.

The group had walked out of a courtroom in Makati City, metro Manila, where Trillanes and some of the soldiers with him were under trial for an alleged mutiny in 2003.

After a two-kilometer walk, the group entered the five-star Manila Peninsula Hotel, where Trillanes and companions arranged for a press conference. From an original group of about a dozen that had been covering the trial, the number of journalists swelled as different news organizations smelled a developing story and sent reporters to the hotel to monitor events there.

Danilo Lim, an Army general who had marched with Trillanes, read a statement before the cameras, calling on President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to step down from power and on the Filipino people and the armed forces to withdraw their support from her. Among the reasons they cited were the allegedly illegitimate presidency of Mrs. Arroyo and her government’s failure to address several controversies and scandals in which Mrs. Arroyo and her Cabinet had been implicated.

The siege

Mrs. Arroyo has been fighting allegations that she cheated in the 2004 elections, in addition to claims that her takeover from her deposed predecessor was illegal. Government officials close to her, as well as her husband, have also been implicated in a number of corruption controversies.

A few hours later, the police had surrounded the hotel and asked for a dialogue with the leaders of the group. The requests were rebuffed by Trillanes and Lim. Police director Geary Barias, who was in charge of the operations there, then gave Trillanes and company a 3 pm deadline for the group to surrender.

The police also requested journalists to leave the area, which they declared was “a crime scene”. Some heeded the police request or followed their news editors’ orders to vacate the premises, but many decided to stay.

The police stormed the hotel when the deadline lapsed, using an armored personnel carrier to smash through the main hotel entrance, and lobbing tear gas canisters at the groups’ positions. This prompted Trillanes and his group to surrender.

The arrests

Once they had taken Trillanes and his companions into custody, the police turned their attention to the journalists who had refused to leave, among whom were print and broadcast journalists from foreign as well as local media organizations.

The police arrested more than 50 journalists, restraining some of them with plastic handcuffs, and herded them into a bus which took them to a nearby military camp. The police also confiscated media equipment, including cameras and sound recorders.

The police later justified their actions by saying that the arrests were part of “normal police procedure” in crime scenes. The police added that some members of Trillanes’s group might also have disguised themselves as journalists to escape arrest, thus the need to verify the identities of everyone who had remained in the hotel, including the media people who had stayed.

In the days that followed, the police arranged dialogues with media organizations with the announced intention of crafting joint press and police guidelines for situations similar to the Peninsula incident.

Journalists refused the police offer, declaring that the Constitutional provision on the public’s right to information was enough for them to do their job. They added that any guidelines would impose limits on the right of journalists to cover political crises in behalf of the public’s right to know.

ABS-CBN, the Philippines’ largest broadcasting network whose personnel and equipment were among those seized by the police, announced that it might file charges of illegal arrest against the police. The police countered by saying that they too would file obstruction of justice cases against the media if this happened. The police also alleged that there were journalists who had helped some of Trillanes’ men escape.

The question

News organizations and several journalists’ groups in the Philippines have declared that it is up to the reporter on the ground, in consultation with their editors, to decide if they should stay or leave. In the November 29 incident, those who had stayed had concluded that there was no immediate danger to them from the Trillanes group, and that it was their duty to keep reporting on an event of public interest. However, some journalists and academics also said that the journalists who had continued to cover the incident had unnecessarily risked their lives just to get a story.

What is the journalist’s ethical responsibility in similar situations? Should he or she continue to cover events on the basis of his or her evaluation of the situation, or should he or she heed the request/order of authorities to leave? Does your news organization have a policy when it comes to similar situations? On what ethical principle or principles is this policy based?