Rappler playing the victim card

IT would have been a clean narrative. organization has violated not only an ordinary law, but the Constitu tion, when it allowed a foreign entity to have some management control over its operations. And for that, it has

The narrative would have been this, and not because it is being punished for using its media power, turned it into a privilege to distort facts and present this as truth, present wrong statistics, and allowed itself to be come a partisan tool of the political opposition.

It would have been a simple case of upholding the law, instead of the state unleashing its power against a media entity that has used the bill of weapon against truth.

However, Rappler is now playing the victim card.

The optics that is presented, espe cially in the foreign media, and by the political opposition and the crit ics of the Duterte administration, is that Rappler is being singled out and punished for being critical of govern ment. The headlines of international and regional newspapers now paint the whip on critical media, effectively lumping the Philippines with Cam bodia and other repressive regimes.

Hence, the issue of violating the law, no less than the fundamental law of the land, is rendered secondary, even as repression of press freedom narrative. Even in this moment of being cited as a transgressor of the Constitution, Rappler has been very effective in spinning the narrative to its own political line.

Maria Ressa has now become an sibility of willingly going to prison. Rappler which has already suffered a serious decline in readership and internet engagements, and is suffering by Ressa starting an online fund drive,