Reporters covering the Senate pushed back forcefully on Thursday after Senator Rodante Marcoleta described a large portion of the mainstream press as bought-and-paid-for operatives, calling the characterization a danger to democratic life rather than a fair critique.
In a joint statement, the Senate press corps said the remark went well beyond legitimate scrutiny of news coverage. They condemned “in the strongest possible sense the sweeping claim by Sen. Rodante Marcoleta that many members of the mainstream media are nothing more than paid hacks.” The journalists argued that branding an entire profession as corrupt amounts to vilification, which they distinguished sharply from the kind of constructive feedback they said democratic societies should welcome.
Marcoleta made the comment while the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee was meeting on June 4 — a session that unfolded amid an open struggle over who controls the panel. The hearing had been thrown into question after Senator Erwin Tulfo, newly installed to chair the anti-corruption committee in a leadership reshuffle, moved to cancel the Thursday proceedings and reset them for Monday, June 8. The committee’s earlier chair, Senator Pia Cayetano, went ahead with the investigation into alleged irregularities in flood control projects regardless. When reporters pressed Senator Sherwin Gatchalian on whether anyone had tried to shut down the inquiry, he denied it and pointed to the June 8 schedule on record with the Senate.
The press corps framed the dispute around the role journalists are meant to play, insisting they answer to the public and to verifiable facts rather than to any politician, party, or warring bloc. They wrote that the media should never be conscripted into the rivalries and power plays of political figures, nor treated as something to be deployed by one faction or discarded as a casualty of another’s fight.
The statement also drew a line on accountability for those leveling accusations. Officials who make serious charges against reporters, the journalists said, carry an obligation to produce proof rather than lean on inflammatory language that chips away at democratic institutions. They warned that unsupported attacks on the press feed a hostile environment for people whose work involves real risk — intimidation, harassment, and in some cases threats to their safety — as they report on those in power.
