The milieu of Isagani Yambot

It is said newspapermen don’t retire. They just drop dead.

This is exactly what Isagani Yambot did. He was felled by a heart attack—the swiftest assassination that ever afflicted the human race—on Friday, March 2, following a six-hour multiple bypass surgery a week before. He was 77. Death struck while he was apparently recuperating from a procedure that could tax the health of other men half his age.

Newspapermen are a class of people who are considered by insurance underwriters as occupying one of the most stressful jobs  in industrial societies, next to soldiers and policemen. They are regarded as high insurance risks, commanding higher premiums for their insurance policies. What amazes some of his friends is how Yambot survived the rigors of his killer occupation to a ripe old age, with a lucid mind.

I am not speaking about Yambot’s remarkable defiance of the natural laws of decay but more about his professional life’s adaptation and resilience to turbulent political upheavals in this country that bracketed his journalistic career devoted to chronicling the tumultuous events of political change.

Our paths crossed in the Manila Times building on Florentino Torres Street. In the 1960s, Gani was one of the promising middle-level journalists who were the protégés of the Times editor, Jose Luna Castro. Gani was already a senior desk editor, who was very quiet and did his work seriously. The other section of the building was occupied by the Daily Mirror, the afternoon paper of the Times publications. Gani was just slightly younger than I. I was diplomatic reporter and political columnist of the Mirror and under the mentorship of Emilio “Abe” Aguilar Cruz, the erudite and highly cultured journalist who taught me the nuances of good wine and cultivated my interest in classical music.

By the 1970s, Gani had moved on to higher and more responsible editorial jobs in the Times hierarchy. The proclamation of martial law by President Marcos in 1972 reshaped Gani’s career direction. Marcos shut the Times, and Gani moved on to papers owned by the Marcos family, in particular Kokoy Romualdez’s Times Journal group.

By then I was editor in chief of the Manila Chronicle, which was also padlocked by the Marcos dictatorship. Gani’s old paper, the Times, and the Lopez family’s Chronicle were aligned in opposition to the dictatorship.

When Marcos closed the independent newspapers, the well-trained and senior staff of these papers lost their jobs and had to join government-approved papers. Those who could not live with the censorship had to leave the country and look for newspaper jobs abroad. I chose to leave and the Melbourne Age, a leading broadsheet in Australia, hired me as sub-editor in its foreign news section. I stayed there in exile for more than 10 years and returned to Manila in 1985, on the eve of the February 1986 “snap” election leading to the outbreak of the People Power Revolution.

Martial law in 1972 and Edsa 1986 bracketed and truncated the careers of senior journalists of the 1960s generation. After Edsa and the restoration of democracy, Gani’s and my career rejoined in the 1990s, when he was appointed publisher of the Inquirer and I was taken in as a columnist writing political analysis.

Whatever departures and deviations took place in our journalistic careers, or however these were affected by the upheavals of martial law and Edsa, these careers were cut from the same bolt of cloth of the discipline of pre-martial law journalism.

There are not many surviving journalists of the 1960s generation. They are an endangered species. Gani Yambot was a creature of the discipline of that kind of journalism. That generation cut its teeth on the principle that newspapering is about hard facts, and less opinion. News is reporting facts and events that happened yesterday and not what will happen tomorrow or what reporters would like to happen.

Yambot never forgot that principle carved on granite even after he had scaled the commanding heights of the newspaper industry. He was a reporter at heart and in practice. Newspapers are about hard facts—verifiable facts—not about opinion.

When you are reading a newspaper with more space devoted to opinion, then you are not reading a good newspaper. You are reading a newspaper full of hot air from self-important commentators full of themselves.

Our generation of newspapermen was called the ballpen-and-note-pad brigade. There were no cell phones then, no computers, no Internet.

Newspapermen pushed pencils and pounded portable Remington typewriters until their fingers ached. Today, you  won’t see a journalist without a laptop or iPad. And yet the old-school journalists of the old-technology journalism produced beautiful and powerful stories. Newspapers today are flooded by social media stories from Facebook or Twitter which are hard to verify and authenticate.

Cyberspace journalism gives us an oversupply of information from impressionable citizen journalists. And this Internet journalism poses a threat to the survival of the newspaper as a medium of information.

The newspaper is fighting for its life against the assault of the cyberspace media. Yambot spent a good part of his life as a journalist struggling to save the newspaper from extinction.