LP senators take up cudgels for Phl media

Senators from the Liberal Party (LP) yesterday reminded President Duterte that being criticized in the media is something he should expect as president and is necessary for preserving democracy.

Sen. Francis Pangilinan, president of the LP, said individual freedoms and the country’s democracy “are better served by a free and critical press.”

“It is part of our democracy for presidents to be at the receiving end of a critical press. Many presidents before have had their share of squaring off with the press,” Pangilinan said.

“All these presidents have since left Malacañang but the press is still very much around,” he said.

Duterte on Thursday spewed out expletives in denouncing Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) and ABS-CBN for their supposed unfair reporting and threatened to expose the lives of the families behind the two media outfits.

He assailed their owners – the Prietos and the Lopezes – calling them oligarchs and “full of s***.”

For detained Sen. Leila de Lima, Duterte’s latest tirade against the media showed he was losing his mind.

“His gross intolerance of dissent and criticisms is undoubtedly among the top qualities of this President,” De Lima said in a note from her detention at Camp Crame.

De Lima noted that the President’s “unabashed contempt” for media and his critics continues to intensify and “his resort to toxic or vitriol language is at a seeming apex.”

“Indeed, as today’s PDI editorial puts it, he has lost the argument. And I go further – he has lost his mind (and for quite a while already),” she said.

“Why blame the media when there is much of Duterte’s behavior and that of his circle of sycophants that warrants scrutiny and even censure,” she added.

De Lima noted the infighting among the allies of the President, which she said could end up harming public good if left unchecked.

“Go fix first yourself and your own backyard Mr. President, before picking a fight with everybody else,” she said.

Duterte allies Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and Davao del Norte Rep. Antonio Floirendo Jr. are at loggerheads over what was said to be a spat between their girlfriends.

Alvarez has filed a complaint of graft against Floirendo, which the latter said was in response to the Speaker’s suspicion that he was part of moves to oust him.