"….RATHER ERR
ON THE SIDE OF FREEDOM….?"
Andres S. Gatmaitan
1956-1957
The seething invidious denunciations of the
Philippine Collegian and a university official aired in the Manila Chronicle by several
people whom the university records reveal to be students more fictitious than real, and
the apparent eagerness of the said daily to publish such disparaging tirades under a
‘brash disclaimer of responsibility’ betray a gross lack of appreciation of the
finer points of criticism. In a strained attempt to justify the misconceptions generated
by the circulation of grave but unfounded charges colored by the desire to discredit those
who would not kowtow to the whims of a disgruntled few , the Chronicle invokes the
oft-quoted phrase ‘rather err on the side of freedom’ as if it were embarking on
some worthy crusade, or startling expose or fighting for a lost cause.
The phrase is a fancy one , and while we
are prone to avail of its liberalistic slant in doing away with prior censorship which
stultifies the growth of the liberal tradition in the university, we maintain that it
grants no license for any newspaper to permit its use as a convenient device to for
spreading derogatory aspersions creating unjustified misapprehensions. Occasional slips or
deviations from the accepted norms of decency , fairness, and morality may not constitute
sufficient grounds for suppression or adherence to inflexible controls, but when
‘rather err on the side of freedom’ is taken to men freedom to err at will -
journalistic responsibility becomes a mockery, a farce - a mere travesty.
It is a cardinal journalistic tenet that
the primary responsibility of a newspaper is to its reading public. And as the Harvard
Daily Crimson puts it ‘fulfillment of such responsibility is not measured by the
degree of acceptance of what is published in the paper. Nor does such responsibility mean
mere pondering. It implies at least an obligation to withold from the public what the
newspaper itself would honestly consider as offensive.’
So a newspaper, if it must lay claim to
being a responsible one, can neither abdicate nor shift that responsibility to the hapless
reading public. For while there may be a more intelligent and discerning segment of that
reading public, it is not always the case that someone would go out of his way to correct
or expose that which the paper should not have published in the first place. A responsible
paper cannot just swallow what is rammed down its throat by intriguing would-be critics
and pass it n to the public. If that would be the rule we might as well junk the canons of
journalism and shove it to the nearest wastebasket. |
