I’M BAFFLED why not a few journalists still think that they are mere stenographers, reporting whatever this or that jerk says, and even make it their newspapers’ front-page banner story.

Consider one newspaper’s banner headline yesterday: “Govt urged: Act on EU call.” It quoted at length this obscure labor leader’s claim that if government does not “act on that EU call” — which is, among other things, to release an unrepentant American journalist convicted for libel by the Manila Regional Trial Court and withdraw the Anti-Terrorism Law passed in July — the country will suffer “more unemployment and loss of business opportunities” as a result of Europe’s trade sanctions.