Truth Telling and other Perils in “Democratic” Philippines 211 in encouraging professional and ethical practice through self-regulation. But the drive for prot and “exclusives” has made self-regulation problematic. Most of the TV and radio reporters onsite during the August 23, 2010 hostagetaking incident at Manila's Rizal Park violated many of the existing guidelines of the KBP (the broadcasters' association), among them the provision of the Broadcast Code that specically forbids revealing troop and police movements during periods of crisis. One network provided the hostage-taker such information as the positions of the police snipers and the deployment of the police assault teams. The onsite reporters of RMN radio, by interviewing the hostage-taker live, in the process also enabled him to plead his case to a wider public and to gain public sympathy. The reporters also ended up mediating between him and the police. All the networks and their afliate radio stations also broadcast the arrest of the hostage-taker's brother, and thus contributed to his being provoked into shooting the hostages. They earlier claimed that the frenzy of their coverage did not contribute to the bloody outcome of the August 23 crisis. But the networks eventually took refuge in the argument that they had no choice because the police had not set the limits of media coverage—ironically an invitation, if it was anything, to police intervention. The bloody outcome of the incident provoked Congress into venting its ire on the media. A number of senators, while saying that fear of the media was inhibiting Congress from quickly passing a law to prevent a repetition of the irresponsibility the leading TV networks exhibited, nevertheless threatened to pass such a law. President Benigno Aquino III also made the same threat in a press conference in which he exonerated the undersecretary of the interior, the mayor of Manila, and the former chief of the Philippine National Police from blame, but reserved the harshest words for the behavior of two journalists, which he said “bordered on the criminal.” But even before these responses to media behavior on August 23, and without the benet of any public hearing, Congressman Gabriel Luis Quisumbing had already introduced a bill declaring it unlawful “for any media person to report or present publicly the positions, movements and actions done by (sic) the members of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) during crisis situations.” The penalty for violations is either imprisonment from six months to six years, a ne of P20,000, or both. But not only crises but ordinary day to day reporting has also put journalists in danger from both government and private individuals, particularly in environments where responsible journalism compels journalists to report corruption, bad governance and criminal activity, as was the case with some 90 percent of those journalists killed in the Philippines since 1986. (CMFR, Philippine Press Freedom Report 2007)