Poll survey taken before eruption of bad news
Many times, I have found Ramon Tulfo’s articles in this otherwise credible newspaper to contain baseless, unbelievable, one-sided and generally worthless opinions, but his series on the private lives of Sen. Chiz Escudero and Heart Evangelista takes the cake (Inquirer, 3/28/13).
His conclusion that Senator Escudero’s slide to fourth place in the recent SWS survey has to do with “his spat with the parents of Evangelista, his girlfriend,” has nothing to stand on because the survey was conducted from March 15 to 17, a few days before Evangelista’s parents went public in condemning the senator’s supposed ungentlemanly acts toward them.
This was even before Tulfo’s March 18 column titled “Chiz Escudero: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” where he cited an account of an alleged “best friend” of the Ongpauco couple to make a case that Escudero is “bastos” and “walang pinag-aralan” in private, while he displays his supposed “good side” in public.
So unless the survey respondents of SWS were able to read Tulfo’s and the Ongpauco couple’s minds, and assuming further that they would believe the derogatory stories woven about the senator, there is no way to connect all that badmouthing of Escudero to his lowered ratings.
Tulfo spoke as if he were an authority on the subject when all he knows is at best hearsay or, at worst, pure concoction from an obviously biased source.
Does he know anything about how Senator Escudero was raised by his parents? In effect, Tulfo is saying the senator’s parents did not raise their son properly. Unfortunately, the senator’s father, Rep. Salvador Escudero III, is now dead and can’t defend himself. Meanwhile his mother, a highly respected UP professor, has kept quiet refusing to dignify the gutter-level attacks against her son and their family.
Tulfo’s instigation, repetition and embellishment of the nasty rumors about Escudero and Evangelista are not in keeping with the supposedly high ethical and professional standards of the Inquirer.
—MIGUEL G. ARAULLO,
