You may not like Ramon Tulfo and his aggressive, often expletive-laden style of journalism. I personally know a lot of people who don't – just like I know people who do.

But unless you are also in favor of clamping down on the people's right to know and the freedom of the press, you will have to accept that Tulfo has a job to do. And that he got beat up for doing it.

On the other hand, when people make a spectacle of themselves in a public place, they have already forfeited their right to privacy. The whole point, after all, of the dressing down given by actress Claudine Barretto to the ground personnel of Cebu Pacific at Manila's Terminal 3 last Sunday was to publicly humiliate them for leaving her luggage behind in Caticlan airport.

As a friend of Tulfo and a colleague of his, I feel obligated to take his side in the celebrated airport beatdown. If taking pictures of known personalities making fools of themselves in public is now wrong, then we are really in worse trouble than we thought.

How different, after all, is exposing the anomalies committed by public officials from documenting celebrities behaving badly? If a self-righteous politician steals from the treasury and a goody-goody actress swears in public like a stevedore, they both deserve to be exposed for lying to the public by the press, whose duty is to do just that.

Some people have opined that it is important to discover who started throwing the blows at the airport, and I agree with them. But that is not for me – or any other person who is not conducting the investigation – to talk about at this point.

The matter of who started the melee is best left to the authorities to decide. Both parties in the controversy are not known to be saints, and it will take some time and a lot of impartial investigating to determine how an unfortunately routine airport snafu and the presence of a journalist turned violent.

Then there is also the matter of the failure of both Cebu Pacific to address its customers' concerns that should be looked into. The inutility of the terminal's security force to stop the Santiagos from roughing up Tulfo and the laughable discovery that the building does not even have a working CCTV monitoring system needs to be investigated, as well.

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But what seems clear right now is that Tulfo grabbed his camera phone and started taking pictures of Barretto as she was berating the ground crew. This was resented by Raymart Santiago, the actress' actor-husband; when Tulfo refused to hand over his camera to Santiago, that's when things started to get ugly.

The statement of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines on the matter bears repeating here. "There was nothing wrong in columnist and broadcaster Ramon Tulfo taking photographs of actress Claudine Barretto giving an airline staff a dressing down at the terminal of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport," NUJP said.

"Barretto and her husband are celebrities and are thus, public figures," it added. "They were also in a public place and were involved in a commotion, making the incident legitimate for coverage."

Tulfo, NUJP said, was also right in not handing over his phone camera. "No one has the right to forcibly take a person's camera or phone especially of a journalist documenting a public incident," it added.

If a newspaperwoman had not had the presence of mind to take out her camera and snap pictures of presidential adviser Ronald Llamas buying pirated DVDs at a down-market Quezon City mall, would we ever have heard of it? And if Llamas' armed bodyguards had seen the journalist taking pictures of their boss surreptitiously and demanded that she hand over her camera, would we not be outraged?

But this is Manila, after all. And what should be a debate about the right of Tulfo to do his job is quickly being buried under tangential matters that include allegations that the Inquirer columnist is an arrogant, foul-mouthed and violent person and that Barretto is basically, well, a female version of him.

If public officials and celebrities do not want the press to catch them acting badly, then they should take measures to avoid being seen or heard. They cannot demand that the media only present them in their best light after they've already been captured as all too human.

That's like President Noynoy Aquino telling the press to report only the good news about him and his administration. The only way to do that is by muzzling the press altogether, like the government did during military rule.

I don't always agree with Mon Tulfo and I have long ago decided to ignore his advice to me years ago, long before any of his brothers enthusiastically did so, to follow closely in his footsteps when I was just starting out.

But I will defend Tulfo's right to do his job. The alternative – that of keeping silent when any journalist is attacked for portraying the people we should supposedly admire, respect and obey as less than perfect – is what ultimately led to the Ampatuan massacre.*