Category Archives: media

Girl power

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Duterte and his administration are really afraid of women. For all his misogynistic attitude towards women, deep down he is really scared of us. Look at those who rose up against him: VP Leni Robredo, Sen. Leila de Lima (jailed), Hidilyn Diaz (harassed by government), and Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

He loves to harass and belittle female journalists. It is a scary time to be a journalist in this country. We had been a hotspot for journalist killings for years now (we were the most dangerous place for a journalist next to Iraq for quite some time now) but it has heightened during the reign of Duterte. I am glad I no longer have to report national news and suffer through his Q&A, press conferences with Harry Roque, or even monitor Duterte’s late night ramblings.

“Many Philippine presidents have attacked the press, but only Rodrigo Duterte, of all the presidents, have publicly subscribed to the idea that journalists are fair game for murder,” Varona says.

Attacks and harassment: Women journalists in the Philippines on the cost of truth-telling

Because of the dangers we are facing with Duterte’s rise to power, some veterans in the industry like Howie Severino, Glenda Gloria, and Sheila Coronel, called us to a meeting in a secluded restaurant in Quezon City just to talk about forming a guild so that we can protect ourselves and fight back. Sadly, nothing happened after that initial meeting because we were just too damn busy trying to survive our day-to-day work of churning out stories. This was the week I got brutally attacked by government-backed online trolls that even harassed my office in Hong Kong.

I had issues with Maria Ressa and I won’t list them down here and those who had been in the industry long enough know what those are. But I admire her grit and determination to fight this tyrant single-handedly. I had marched alongside them wearing black when they had the march for press freedom in UP.

Since day one of becoming a journalist–since I co-wrote that series on juvenile justice–I knew that every time I publish a story, I have one foot on my grave. I had been threatened with lawsuits before and I had been scared but I pushed on. Being a journalist during the time of Duterte, even if you are not covering him, is a doubly dangerous job. I was told that a powerful government official does not like me because I am vocal about my anti-Duterte stance. And he scolded me and lost his cool on national TV when I was hosting a forum where he was a guest. I was asking a fair question that everyone needed to ask. It was scary but I had to keep my composure. I was told he and other officials boycotted the forum the following year because of me.

I had friends in Reuters publicly lynched by the mob, having their IDs, photos and personal information posted on the Internet, with trolls encouraging the public to inflict physical harm on them and their families. (Upon investigation by some of my other journo friends, my Reuters friends’ personal information was leaked from their records with the National Bureau of Investigation–information that they got whenever we needed clearance to apply for visas or passports). In a country where life is very cheap (you can have somebody killed for only PHP 5,000), those are not empty threats. Their employer had to take them and their families to safehouses until the storm died down. I was so distraught that time that I had to take a break from the Philippines and went to a place where no one spoke English–Taiwan–and took a breather to collect myself for a week. I just didn’t want news from the Philippines and I just had to be away immediately.

But Maria Ressa had to endure conviction, harassment, bankruptcy, and daily mental torture and yet she plodded on. She had to wear bullet-proof vests whenever she goes out. Because it’s no secret Duterte wants her dead.

This administration has demonized us. It’s in every dictator’s playbook–demonize every journalist and create your own propaganda machine and feed your shit to the public that has lost trust on the media. Now you all have this revisionism going on and conspiracy theories that make the maleducated poor believe the lies.

Journalists in South America face drug cartels and the corrupt government officials in cahoots with them, we in Southeast Asia battle despots like Duterte and the Marcoses. Journalists in Russia, China (in HK, that is), and the Philippines face the same thing.

My daughter expressed her interest in becoming a journalist. I told her, anak, you can become whatever you want but I hope you don’t follow my footsteps. You will be penniless and you will get killed.

Stop with this inanity

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This does not merit any column inch. The swaying of his helicopter and “near-death” experience is obviously a pre-campaign propaganda. It has been done by presidential aspirants through the years. So sue me! I had been in media for too long to know a skunk when I smell one. The TV5 news desk can argue that the order to publish this kind of inane news item came from the principals because the franchise of Maynilad Water Services (a sister company) has already been granted by Congress so they need to put grease on it to make sure everything runs smooth.

The political economy of media at play. Or the desk is just stupid (as sometimes is the case).

This. This is the type of news that we should not let go of. Eyes on the ball, people!

Meanwhile, I count myself lucky that we could still eat well despite the widespread hardships across the globe. Sometimes I feel guilty. That’s why I do my best to help and teach my children the same. I have yet to send the packs of powdered milk I bought to the orphanage in Manila. Because the capacity to collect donations by the nuns has been diminished by this pandemic. They’re taking care of abandoned elderly and orphans.

To alleviate the anxiety and anger building within me, my daughters and I had a cheeseboard. But I don’t have the actual cheeseboard, just the cheese and charcuterie. And Italian red wine. Because it’s Monday. And it sucks normally.

And there are food items that should be treated with respect. Like this steak. I didn’t have the heart to grill this on the gas-fired grill last weekend. I had to use the charcoal grill because I want the smokiness. My daughter, Twin I, and I made mashed potatoes from scratch to go with the steak.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

My emotions are running high. Anger, anxiety, pain, what-have-you. I no longer know. I’m just limited to Twitter; I cannot write what I want to write to expose all that is wrong with the world right now. I no longer have a platform.

But then, that’s the reason why I walked away from local media in the first place. Because I cared too much that it drained me. I think this internal conflict will stay with me until I fade away.

We’re so f*cked

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This lockdown will never end and this Delta variant is just getting started. I’m scared for my children as no vaccine has been allowed for those aged 18 and below. Even if I’m already fully vaccinated, I can still carry the virus back home when I’m buying supplies outside. I haven’t gone out since Thursday last week or 8 days. My freezer is holding up so I really don’t have to buy meat but I have gone low on vegetables. I have to brave it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Dept of Health Secretary Duque is going straight to hell. He has to answer a lot of questions…missing funds, unpaid hazard pay and allowances to healthcare workers, missing PhilHealth money…He is Satan’s little worker. He’s going straight to hell.

According to Commission on Audit (COA), DOH spent PHP 700,000 (USD 13,868) for four laptops. I wonder what kind of rocket DOH was launching to require them to buy a laptop costing PHP 175,000 (USD 3,467) each.

When I was still reporting on national issues, I used COA reports during my slow news days to investigate how each line agency or Congress is spending its budget. I once wrote about congressmen spending most of their pork barrel on waiting sheds and basketball courts that do not exist. When I was doing the investigative reports on the Napoles pork barrel scam, I used COA reports to follow the money and I haunted the Securities and Exchange Commission to get the General Information Statements of the NGOs that were supposedly the recipients of the pork barrel funds.

PhilHealth not paying hospitals is already crippling the country’s healthcare system. A lot of hospitals are going belly-up and many more will become crippled and may have to close down if this goes on. I wrote a long-form article last year regarding this. As some of my sources said, private hospitals outside Metro Manila have bigger exposure to Philhealth compared to those in Metro Manila as the percentage of privately insured patients and out-of-pocket payers is higher in the country’s capital compared to the provinces. This is dangerous since there is a dearth of public and private hospitals in the provinces and if you have a raging pandemic, it’s like you have already doomed the population that lives outside Imperial Manila.

I was supposed to write something related to this for a local news outfit but the lockdowns and my lack of free time for other things outside my day job have hampered me from doing this. This kind of reportage requires old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism—it involves poring over voluminous public records and documents that could only be provided by sources. Clandestine meetings with sources. Working as an independent journalist on output-basis arrangement with a news agency is not feasible unless the journalist is under a grant. Investigative stories should be done by news outfits that can dedicate a team for this, which we did before. It’s expensive and a lot of work. The news desk will also be understaffed because it will lose people who can write and edit daily spot stories because these people will have to dedicate their waking hours to the project.

So I can’t blame newspapers, TV networks, and online news outfits for not being able to build and retain a special team to tackle stuff like this. They are caught up with the day-to-day production of news stories as they fight for eyeballs and ad revenues. And this country is not like Singapore where nothing happens–where trivial things get front page treatment. Our news cycle is faster than other markets–about two weeks max–because this country is just too fucked up, too many things happening. I remember going through and reporting on a civil war, major earthquake, and earth’s strongest typhoon on record, all of which happened in just three months.

So it is up to the special dedicated investigative journalists to put these corruption stories to the spotlight.

All The President’s Men and Spotlight will not happen if not for them.

The political economy of media

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When I was still teaching in UP, I always introduce my students to the concept of political economy of media in real world settings. Not the kind that you read in textbooks or essays of academics. I tell them how the day-to-day decisions in the newsroom are affected by this. It’s about what story gets killed because the newspaper/TV network’s sacred cows would be offended. Or a real estate company would threaten the advertising department with an ad pullout if the article written by a supposedly independent-minded journalist is slanted differently. You have your ideals as a reporter and an editor but then the powers that be have a different view. As my ex-boss said before, it’s an everyday battle. You keep pushing the envelope; testing how far your sense of justice and fairness can get you.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer was the first newspaper I wrote for. I had been writing for them when I was still in college, which spilled over to my first few months as a fresh grad research assistant. It was born when the country was about to mount an uprising against dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It was founded by Eugenia “Eggie” Apostol, who led Mr and Ms, an innocent-looking magazine that contained anti-dictatorship articles, subversive stories that people like my parents were consuming like mad during the time all media outfits not under Marcos’ thumb are shut down (we had mountains of those magazines at the back of our house, together with Malaya).

It was a newspaper that defied the government when it was wrong. It fought for what was right. It was THE newspaper after Manila Times never recovered its footing after Chino Roces got imprisoned by Marcos and had to sell his newspaper. After some years, Eggie Apostol stepped down and Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc took the reins. She was an equally tough lady who faced a threat of closure by Joseph Estrada when his own presidency was threatened after scandal after scandal was uncovered (which led to another revolt against a sitting president). Manila Times under Lisa Gokongwei did not survive the economic pressures from Estrada after my friend wrote that famous “unwitting ninong” article about the insider trading involving BW Resources and the president. Gokongwei had to sell the Times to an Estrada crony.

Inquirer was the first newspaper that stumbled upon one of the biggest corruption stories of the decade, if not decades, which started with a simple kidnapping case filed with the National Bureau of Investigation around 2012-2013. (I also picked up this “pork barrel” scandal and was part of the investigative team for my own news organization that focused on this and our stories competed and complemented the stories produced by the Inquirer). That newspaper was instrumental for sending three senators ALMOST to prison (the courts have overturned whatever progress we had, after Duterte came into power because crooks gotta band together).

Now I feel that the Inquirer is already a puppet newspaper. It has folded under the pressure from some bit players in that pork barrel scam. The pressure though may not just be coming from one Melo del Prado but from some more sinister quarters of Duterte’s world. I don’t know; it normally wouldn’t succumb to such small fry. But then Duterte has already crippled the owners, the Prietos, when he came into power and there was a point that Ramon Ang, the president and CEO of San Miguel Corp, was about to take over the newspaper because financially they couldn’t cope anymore.

And here is Prof. La Vina’s take on the whole thing:

International cat day and commodification of culture

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I am not one to celebrate silly special days like this but in honor of my cats who give me joy especially during the darkest days, I am now recognizing this day just for them.

One presscon, Kimchi pulls this stunt. Photo by CallMeCreation

Here I was, a screencap of our Zoom press conference last week with my cat, Kimchi, in her weird sleeping position. During the first Q&A my background was blurred but it looked so unnatural that I had to revert to normal background. And now I have a cat acting out in the background.

Meanwhile, I posted this on social media the other day at the height of my despair that may have something to do with Nas Daily’s exploitation of Filipino indigenous culture.

There is a lot of them out there. They make vlogs about the Philippines–from the fake “I love the Philippines”-type of content to exaggerated reaction videos of anything Filipino/Philippines to exploit the Filipinos’ hunger for validation from foreigners, especially the white ones, by doing Pinoy-clickbaiting.

This happens more often to Filipinos because majority of us are English-speaking compared to other nationalities in Asia, thus, we are very accessible and ripe for this type of click-bait content.

And this feeds into Nas Daily’s strategy. After the controversy with Nas Daily’s exploitation of Apo Whang-od (making a Kalinga tattoo course in Nas Academy), Nas Daily lost 500,000 subscribers. That’s how big his Filipino audience is, or that may just be a fraction of his overall Filipino audience.

Nas Academy also lost some content providers like Catriona Gray and Panlasang Pinoy.

As a half-assed academic, I wanted to write a paper about this phenomenon of commodification of culture by so-called influencers viewed through the lens of neo-Marxism. Like there is this conflict between social equality and freedom. In this context, Apo Whang-od has the freedom to monetize her skill (if indeed she fully understood the alleged agreement between her and Nas Daily) but it is not for Nas Daily to exploit because the designs, technique, tools, rituals, and traditions belong to the Butbut tribe of Kalinga (conflict between individual freedom and social equality). There is a governing body that protects all things concerning our indigenous peoples–to make sure that social equality is protected–that Nas Daily bypassed.

Let’s see how this controversy will turn the tide regarding the exploitative vloggers.

To feed the soul

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A colleague, who is my junior, and I were talking about our past lives as online journalists for a TV network. She was saying she missed it, the camaraderie and the achievements that we had, the kind of coverage that we did. She said she missed writing for an audience who would care about what she is writing about.

Writing with meaning. Writing about things that matter.

As I said before, we are writing for money now. Not our money but rather money for our readers–exclusive content that would make them money. It’s not writing with a noble purpose.

I think every writer at some point looks for the soul of what she is writing about.

rewrite edit text on a typewriter
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I had quit that for a while. I gave so much of myself in that last job before this one that I got burnt out. I was headbutting government officials, the government, the world. The country’s problems were my problems. I was a walking mass of nerves. If my insurance covered my jumping out of planes, I would have but my editor strapped me to my chair and said, do something less wild, ok?

I was doing investigative reports. Knocking on doors upon doors, literally, looking for the people in the web of lies I have mapped out. I conducted interviews in the dark, in safe houses, having multiple phones with me just in case one of them gets bugged. I hung out in court houses, listened to court proceedings, pored over evidence and more evidence. I talked to people who were willing to give me evidence. We were almost there, almost sent the criminals to jail. They were indicted. Senators. Ring leaders.

Then it all came to naught. Things got reversed. It’s so tiring. Fighting for justice in this country is tiring.

And then I became a casualty of mergers and acquisitions. The parent company had done a series of bolt-on acquisitions that made my role redundant…even though it didn’t seem like it at first. But as a business journalist, I already saw the writing on the wall. I exited before it happened. After a couple years after I left, it did finally happen. All of them were shown the exit door.

Did I miss it? Yes, I do miss writing from the soul. Do I miss my former life? I don’t know. Maybe the burnout hasn’t worn off yet. The disillusionment has not worn off yet.

I was offered to write a weekly column in a broadsheet some years ago. My boss in HK said, why not? It would have been great marketing for my current company as well. But I turned it down, thinking I would not be able to commit writing that regularly. I may run out of things to say. As it turned out, I was right. It’s not that I would run out of things to say but I ran out of time. I don’t have enough time for everything. Especially in the last 3 years when I was running around with J. I barely had time for myself. A weekly column would have been a chore and I may just churn out something that would be subpar, with no real purpose or meaning.

crop woman using laptop on sofa at home
Photo by Vlada Karpovich on Pexels.com

I was watching this video of of a girl who quit her job to become a full-time artist. It was like her day job was sucking out her soul but she was doing the math and she stayed in her job year in and year out to be able to save enough, create a portfolio of work, gather clients for commissioned work, and students. Then she made the leap and was happy that she was able to do it sooner than she was thinking.

I completely sympathize with her. I was stuck in jobs in other industries for a couple of years before I made a jump to full-time journalism and not just dabbling in writing here and there. At that time I was writing on the side–to keep my spirit alive while I stayed in soul-sucking jobs to put me through graduate school.

Now years later I’m still working at home as a writer. Not that kind of writer that people are romanticizing about, like Hemingway or Nick Joaquin. But writer nonetheless.

Maybe I should restructure my colleague’s question: Do I miss writing about things that matter? Yes. Do I miss the former life of a mad-dash journalist out there in the trenches? Sometimes. What do I want to do to feed my soul?

Maybe I should write on the side. Of things that mattered.

I got an invite to write for a news outlet, a special report about healthcare. I haven’t done it yet because it required too much leg work.

I must pick my battles. Start small. Write in a literary magazine for a start while I write big stuff for my day job.

Oh, and this is the reason why I blog regularly. My writing sucks most of the time because I’ve been stuck writing for my day job for seven years. My writing growth was stymied. I regressed.

Here is something I wrote five years ago about this searching for the soul:

Long form journalism in the click-bait era

Let me tell you about the moment I realized I wanted to be a journalist. We had in our house a desk calendar from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). That calendar had a black and white photo for every month, which I presumed was used in some PCIJ story. I cropped those photos to use in one of my projects for xxx (subject) during my freshman year in college. And somewhere in my gut I knew I wanted to be a journalist after flipping through the pages of my finished project.

All The President’s Men and now Spotlight reinforced my desire to be and stay in this profession.

I cried at the end of the movie. The most poignant part of the film was when Micheal Keaton entered Spotlight’s office and saw the phones ringing off the hooks. He was probably expecting calls from angry parishioners and supporters of the Catholic Church (hence his surprised remark about the absence of picketers the day after the Boston Globe ran the story). But no, these were calls from victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests in Boston. These victims were coming forward to tell their tales, emboldened by Boston Globe’s investigative story on how the church covered up decades of sexual abuse. That for me was the most powerful scene–the reason why we journalists do what we have to do. Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) was right: you don’t focus on the individual stories because nothing will come out of it. You have to go after the system, the system that was so rotten that it has killed so many children who were silenced by shame, guilt and haunting memories of predators. And good journalism serves as a spark that would lead to the correction of that faulty system.

Sadly, dwindling advertising money and the audience’s propensity to gobble up “fastfood” news are whittling down the capacity of newspapers to carry the long form, good ol’ shoe-leather stories.

Keeping an investigative team is expensive. Running stories that may not bring you “hits” or mouse clicks is kind of hard these days. Doing investigative reports is exhausting, and at times you feel like you are alone in your battle. I’ve been there. Countless late nights interviewing sources undercover. Poring over documents and piecing together clues then hitting a brick wall. Sacrificing family life just to be able to bring out the truth to the public is painful.
But what keeps us journalists going? Mark Ruffalo has put it perfectly:

“They knew. They let it happen. To kids! Okay? It could’ve been you! It could’ve been me! It could’ve been any of us! We gotta nail these scumbags! We’ve gotta show the people nobody can get away with this! Not a priest, not a cardinal, or a freaking pope!”

“Spotlight” was devoid of histrionics that made the horrific story that was unfolding so palpable. It was a methodical movie but was a great thriller. It didn’t dwell on the heartbreaking stories of the victims, but by doing so “Spotlight” made each stories of those children more devastating.

Spotlight is an ode to newspapers and to the journalists dying to stay in the profession. To the journalists who fight for change.