EDITORIAL - A sham campaign

The Comelec may have succeeded where dictatorships have failed in clamping down on freedom of expression. And chairman Sixto Brillantes is whining that the Supreme Court has tied down the hands of the poll body?

Go check your newspapers. Scan the opinion pages. There are hardly any discussions anymore about the merits and qualifications of candidates, whose election to public office normally would have deserved the close prior scrutiny that opinion makers provide.

And why is this? It is because the Comelec now considers it campaigning for anyone to mention the name of a candidate and discuss whether he ought to be elected or not. The exception is -- you have to tell the Comelec in advance if you want to do so.

But why should any self-respecting journalist do that? Why would he go to the Comelec and ask its indulgence if he wants to discuss a particular candidate in his writings? What happens now is, journalists are writing about the birds and the bees in the middle of election season.

To be sure, there is some good in this. Journalism is not exactly a profession made in heaven and there are indeed some practitioners who can be made to sing a particular song, for a certain consideration.

But in the overall scheme of things, that is a very small price to pay for killing one of the most useful and effective tools of guiding public discourse, feeling the public pulse, and enlightening public decisions.

To kill the public's right to be informed and form decisions based on unrestricted data from the media, including from commentaries and opinions, simply because of the unreliability of some of that data, is to insult the ability of the public to make distinctions.

The public is a far better judge of the truth than the Comelec can ever be, and it is preposterous for the poll body to think otherwise just because it is in charge of all election activities. By restricting public discourse, the Comelec has made the campaign a sham.