What It Means
- Press groups asked Sen. Rodante Marcoleta to prove his Press Attack ‘bayaran’ claim or retract it, and within hours he did neither cleanly.
- He told journalists at a Senate hearing that most of them are paid, a sweeping charge with no evidence behind it.
- His own bloc walked the remark back in real time, recasting it as a comment about PR rather than reporters.
- Every defense narrowed the charge while the original words stayed sweeping, which left the accusation unsupported.
Sen. Rodante Marcoleta told a room of working journalists on Thursday that most of them are bayaran, paid. The press freedom groups that cover the Senate did not wait for the news cycle to turn. They asked him to prove it or take it back. What followed over the next few hours was not a defense of the claim. It was a series of attempts to make the claim smaller, and none of them matched what he actually said.
The remark came during the Blue Ribbon hearing run by the Cayetano bloc, where 18 men presenting themselves as former Marines repeated allegations that they delivered kickback money tied to the flood control scandal. Marcoleta, presiding, opened by turning on the press in the room. His exact line, in Filipino, was that the media participants, most of them, are paid. He did not name anyone. He did not produce a document. He branded the profession and moved on.
The Charge Was Sweeping, the Defense Was Not
The Presidential Task Force on Media Security drew the line first. It told Marcoleta to back the claim with solid evidence or withdraw it and apologize to the reporters he had accused. The press freedom groups that cover the chamber followed with their own statement, calling the remark reckless and unfair and pointing to the obvious gap. There is a difference between criticizing coverage and branding an entire profession as bought, and the second one needs proof the senator never offered.
The Photojournalists’ Center of the Philippines and the National Union of Journalists, two of the country’s main press freedom organizations, added their condemnations the same afternoon. Even inside the chamber the remark did not hold. Sen. JV Ejercito broke with the framing and said it was sad to accuse mainstream reporters of being paid.
The Walk Back Happened on the Live Feed
The most telling part did not come from a press release. It came from the broadcast. After the press attack drew immediate pushback, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano leaned toward Marcoleta and can be heard on the Senate feed telling him he meant PR. Marcoleta then said he did not mean all media. Watch the footage and you see the correction being assembled between two senators while the mic is still open.
By the time Cayetano faced reporters, the recast was the official position. He framed the remark as being about PR rather than the reporters in the room, and said Marcoleta “didn’t mean that most or many.” That last part is the problem. Marcoleta did not say some, and he did not say a few. He said most of the media in the room are paid. A defense that he never meant most cannot be reconciled with a sentence built around the word most.
A Half Apology That Defended the Substance
Marcoleta’s own version arrived at a briefing later in the day. He apologized for the way he spoke and said he did not mean the press attack. In the same breath he defended the remark, tracing it to his frustration over delays in the flood control investigation and to an older grievance, that two newspaper reports on a January 2025 INC rally left out his name entirely, and he had been one of the four speakers.
That second reason is the tell. Asked to prove that the press is bought, he offered a story about reporters who failed to quote him. The complaint is not evidence of payment. It is evidence of being overlooked. The distance between the accusation and the reason he gave for it is the whole story, and it is where the press freedom argument actually sits.
Press Freedom Costs Nothing to Attack and a Lot to Defend
Strip away the back and forth and the structure is plain. A committee chair made a serious public accusation against the press with no proof, and when the press asked for proof, the accusation kept shrinking until it bore no resemblance to the words on tape. Denial, then PR, then not all media, then frustration over old coverage. Four versions, none of them the sentence he said.
This is the cost the press freedom debate rarely prices in. The smear is cheap. It takes one sentence and reaches every feed. The correction is expensive and slow, and it never travels as far as the original. By the time the contradiction is mapped, the line that most reporters are paid has already done its work on anyone inclined to believe it. The retraction does not call that audience back.
The hearing where it happened ran without a Senate secretary and without stenographers, so there is no clean official transcript to settle disputes against. The record that exists is the one the press built. The press freedom of the reporters in that room was never the senator’s to grant or revoke, and the proof is the work they did anyway. What press freedom protects, in the end, is exactly this, the ability to set the tape next to the claim and let people see the difference. The people he called bought are the same ones who documented the contradiction, on the record, the same day. The accusation has no evidence. The rebuttal has a tape.
Full Video of the senate session and press interview here
More developments that reshape the operating environment in National Signal section of Hemos PH.
