EDITORIAL - Freedom of the press

At least two media outlets, one a giant television network, the other a national daily, have made a very grave journalistic crime by imputing something on someone solely on the basis of their own perceptions.

The two media outlets ran stories about an interview with President Arroyo last week in which they reported that the president blew her top and walked out of the interview. Nothing was more maliciously twisted than those stories.

Unless the videotapes of that interview have been destroyed to get rid of the evidence, those media outlets involved in this blatant conspiracy should review them again and again to see if what they reported, shorn of any preconceived bias, matches the evidence.

We have seen the interview at least twice, because the network kept repeating the story, and we have read the print version in the newspaper, and nothing that the story said matches the story line being pushed.

Arroyo was smiling all over the place. Everything that she said was civil and was never in any danger of spilling over into anger. She was never close to being the "Taray Queen" that she, admittedly, was before.

This is not in defense of Arroyo. We are just scandalized, as a member of the same profession, by the brazen way in which some media outlets twist the truth, either to make a story sell or, worse, to satisfy and sustain their biases.

It was possible Arroyo may have been indeed secretly angry. But she never showed it. It was therefore very high-handed for supposedly professional and objective media to come up with a news report based solely on guesswork.

Arroyo did indeed abruptly end the interview. But isn't that her right? The right to grant and terminate interviews belongs to the interviewee, not the media. Freedom of the press does not include the right to hold people hostage or shape them according to our notions.