CRUEL MEDIUM: The question of whether or not to allow live radio-television coverage of the Ampatuan massacre trial should not be resolved on the basis alone of that gruesome case that has wounded Maguindanao and the rest of the watching world.

Let us be reminded that whatever rules the court applies to Ampatuan will also apply indiscriminately to all other criminal cases.

Let us be careful not to be enraged by what looks like blood in Ampatuan’s hands.

Pointing the cruel TV camera on Ampatuan et al. to add to their ordeal may be justified if they are guilty beyond reasonable doubt. But we are restrained by the constitutional instruction to presume the accused innocent until proved otherwise.

* * *

HE’S GUILTY!: I know that inflicting torture is not the purpose of our asking for open live coverage. The loftier reasons are for transparency, freedom of the press and the public’s right to information. I will discuss those points later.

Having followed the case for a year, although only from a distance, I must confess that I now think the Ampatuans are guilty as charged.

Like countless other kibitzers, I have no direct personal knowledge of the details of the incident that snuffed out at least 57 lives in Ampatuan country. Like most people, I am not in possession of evidence.

What I know is only what I have absorbed from the relentless reports of the mass media. The avalanche of news, tinted with views, has been so overwhelming that I am now convinced that the accused are guilty.

* * *

ANGER & DISTORTION: As a brother-in-trade of the 34 media workers who were massacred with the prime political targets, I should be angry. I am.

Is that good or bad?

Yes and no. Yes, for obvious reasons. No, because I should not allow personal feelings to take hold of me if I intend to report on the case.

As a working newspaperman, I want transparency and the freest possible access to information. Will live radio-TV coverage provide freer access? Yes, it will.

Isn’t that good?

Yes and no. Yes for obvious reasons, No, because unregulated freedom, especially if tainted with irresponsibility, may distort the facts and the same freedom that we in media sometimes die for.

* * *

LIKE A PAINTING: In my professional work of some four decades, I have labored under shifting parameters of what passes for freedom of the press.

I have come to realize that the beauty of freedom is not so much in its free-wheeling enjoyment in a borderless landscape as in its being refined and defined for the common enjoyment by its supposed beneficiaries.

I have likened press freedom before to a painting, whose beauty and message are better captured and appreciated if the canvas is appropriately framed and hung.

If I may use another analogy, recall the Aug. 23 hostage-taking fiasco at the Luneta. That was press freedom gone haywire. That other massacre was partly a creation of live TV coverage.

That hostage coverage gone awry may explain partly why I pine for disciplined freedom of the press, or, if I may use an oxymoron, restrained freedom.

* * *

SC HAS SPOKEN: We are searching for a happy balance between justice and freedom. The press and the public continue to teeter between a person’s presumed innocence and the people’s right to information.

Who will find and define for all of us that sharp fulcrum on which that delicate balance hangs?

The Supreme Court seems to think it has found it, although what it found does not look balanced enough. It ordered an outright ban on live RTV coverage.

The Supreme Court, then headed by Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., denied in an 8-6 decision on June 29, 2001, a petition to allow a live broadcast coverage of the Sandiganbayan trial of the plunder cases against former President Erap Estrada.

The SC said that “due process guarantees the accused a presumption of innocence until the contrary is proved in a trial where the conclusions reached are induced not by any outside force or influence but only by evidence and argument given in open court.”

* * *

OBSTRUSIVE PRESENCE: On notable occasions, the SC had performed suspicious somersaults, reversing its own en banc majority decisions. What more on such wiggly ideas as freedom and guilt on an unstable 8-6 vote of its members?

The SC ban on RTV live coverage rests on fears that extraneous factors, such as the obtrusive presence of media and their electronic gear – including intimidating cameras – could influence the process, the participants and even the decision.

While we grant that the presiding judge can remain unaffected by the TV presence, we cannot say the same thing for the average viewer who may just swallow what the broadcast monitors spoon-feed him.

* * *

SORT OF JURY TRIAL: The multimedia coverage will create two levels of judgment. One is that of the presiding judge whose decision may not always tally with the verdict of the public at large viewing on another level.

Sometimes they call the latter level trial by publicity.

We will have a split kind of jury trial —  with the TV viewers sitting as in a jury box and ready to hand down their own judgment regardless of how the presiding judge interprets the law and appreciates the facts of the case.

Imagine the confusion if the judge hands down a decision which is at variance with the verdict of  the watching public acting as a sort of jury at large!

(Almost at the end of my space, I will just conclude that, everything considered, I am for a regulated multimedia coverage of the Ampatuan trial. I’ll explain, especially the “regulated” aspect of coverage, next time the subject crops up.)