Defenders of the faith

MANILA, Philippines—Today it is the opinion writers being blamed by the Aquino administration.

On Thursday, the gentlemen of the Presidential Communications Group put the slow collapse of the yellow juggernaut squarely on the shoulders of the nation’s opinion writers.

“We don’t have any problem with the Malacañang Press Corps,” says spokesman Edwin Lacierda. “There’s no problem with the news itself but perhaps with the columnists who are always criticizing him.”

It is an odd sort of compliment Malacañang pays to what I suspect is one of the nation’s most frustrated professions. At a time when the already thin layer of middle class is narrowing, just as the children of a swelling metropolis are deprived of food and education, the Aquino administration sees fit to blame negative public opinion on the newspapers the public cannot buy, published in a language the public can hardly read. It is as odd as blaming condoms for the rise in abortions or President Aquino for the massacre in Maguindanao, or Ninoy Aquino for his daughter’s verbal diarrhea. Much as has been said of the egos of columnists and opinion writers, I suspect not one would claim credit to changing public opinion enough to pull down the ratings of a popular President who has done no wrong.

I write this today at the slow center of a regular week in Manila. “Slow” is relative, slow means the massacres are at a minimum and the floods are slow to rise. There is nothing particularly odd, for example, in the two inches of floodwater whooshing past the glass doors of SM Megamall while the rest of the nation celebrated the inevitable Pacquiao victory, or in the fact that a family of 15 pays P1,500 every month to live in a cardboard box on the third floor of a four-story shanty in the middle of San Andres Bukid, Manila. Only one among the 13 children goes to school.

“There is no problem with the news itself,” says Lacierda. There is a decided lack in positive writing, says the President. The good news has been cancelled out by negative write-ups.

Last week, a 13-year-old boy died while foraging for metal in Makati, the victim of three policemen. Witnesses say Christian Serrano and two other teenagers were scavenging for scrap metal at an abandoned building in Kamagong Street when a Makati police mobile arrived. One shot was fired allegedly to chase the boys away. A second shot caught Serrano in the back. He was pronounced dead on arrival after being rushed to the Ospital ng Makati. His mother says it was her son’s first time to forage. Christian had wanted to be a police officer.

A few days later, a policeman assigned to move vendors away from Baclaran Church sidewalks died at 6:45 a.m. at the San Juan de Dios Hospital. Police Officer 3 Mapilindo Prades was the last to head home after operations when he was shot in the head along Redemptorist Road by one of the vendors.

Lacierda said opinion writers should sit down with the President for them to be apprised of his policies and programs. “Constant exposure” comparable to reporters covering Malacañang might help them in reporting less negative stories.

On May 13, veteran journalist and University of the Philippines professor Lourdes “Chit” Estella-Simbulan was killed as a speeding passenger bus rammed the back of the taxi she was riding on Commonwealth Avenue.

After the accident, Lacierda made it clear that one of the “pet peeves” of President Aquino was bus accidents “that should not be happening in the first place.” The President, properly peeved, was quoted that “He wants the bus companies to be properly supervised and monitored. Maintenance concerns should be the top agenda of bus companies.”

Several days later, at 4:30 a.m., 10 people were injured when two speeding passenger buses collided with each other on Commonwealth Avenue. Several are in serious condition. There is no word yet if the President is also peeved.

“But these are all columnists,” says Lacierda. “They have their own opinions, they have their own jaded view of certain events.”

This is not an attempt at political commentary, nor is this the Sunday outing of the mythical creature the conservative public and the national government call objective journalism. I do not believe in objectivity. The choice of story, the arrangement of sentences, the manner of weighing facts, the use of one word over another, the employment of standards, all of it is analysis, all of it opinion, legitimate or otherwise. There are bad writers, and good writers, and ethical news as well as unethical. It is not a positive outlook that defines the critical writing that can help a nation, it is rational argument, an insistence on balance, and a commitment to facts and fair play that characterizes good opinion writing, qualities in constant play in the writing of Pete Lacaba, Glenda Gloria, Jose Dalisay, Raul Pangalangan, and the late Nick Joaquin. None of these writers while they wrote can be considered cheerleaders for any particular administration, and yet their work stings not of jadedness, but of outrage.

The good may have been eclipsed by the bad, and that may be a good thing, as the death of five becomes irrelevant after the brutal deaths of many in a bus on a public grandstand. Perhaps the 10 men and women who were riding the two buses along Commonwealth Avenue last Thursday should also have been more jaded before they paid for their tickets. Perhaps Cyen Esclanda of Cabusao, Camarines Sur, one of the children selected by organizers to speak to the President via video link during World Water Day, should also have been more jaded after the President’s promise of water services in his town of 17,500 people—after all, as Newsbreak reported, Cabusao is still not considered one of the government’s 115 priority towns for water. There’s no need to tell the mothers of the millions of infants about to be born into poverty to be jaded, and no call to inform the thousands of nursing graduates without jobs.

Or it might be that Lacierda is right, and the reason Christian Serrano’s mother does not think highly of this government is not because her 13-year-old died with a bullet in his back, it is because she has been reading this page the past year.