The Filipinos as heroes
IT’S DIFFICULT to keep one’s objectivity as a journalist at a time when the first instinct is to take up an Armalite instead of a word—processor.
And yet, in the middle of all this jubilation and this sorrow, some people have to sort out all the stories so that the reader can have some comprehension of what’s happening to his country.
A newspaper desk is a perfect observation post for a historic event such as a people winning back their freedom, but it is also a terrible place in which emotions wash back and forth and hopes and dreams surge and recede like inexorable tides.
It is particularly painful when you have friends fighting on both sides and all you can do is hope that none of them are hurt or killed in the cataclysm enveloping your country.
And yet, uppermost, more important than any personal or human consideration is the knowledge that the people are freeing themselves from tyranny and oppression, from years of physical and intellectual bondage, and like a Phoenix arising from its ashes, this Nation might at last, at long, long terrible last, be once again free.
It is a time for joy, a time for tears, a time for breathing free.
For even if Marcos ultimately prevails, and at this point in time, the issue remains in doubt, we have fought enough of a fight to let him and all dictators in the future know that our national symbol is not the patient carabao plodding ahead of the plow.
For the Filipinos are eagles, crashing against the bars of their cages, willing to fight and die for even one last flight into the sky.
* * *
What ever the outcome of this upheaval, I have one friend now living abroad who must make an apology upon his return. When 24 of us newspapermen were arrested upon the declaration of Martial Law in 1972, this friend of mine and I went into Camp Crame confident that the Filipino people would rise in revolt against Marcos. Months later, when we were released, with most Filipinos approving Marcos martial rule, my friend immigrated to Australia, and when I took him to the airport, he said, in all bitterness, “Louie, leave the country, the heroism of the Filipino died with Gregorio del Pilar”.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
***
It was a real jolt to watch Channel 4 re-open as a liberated television station.
For those of us who were literally booted out and bolted out of television in 1972, it was like a coming home of sorts. The people you saw on TV were men and women who have suffered censorship of all forms under the Marcos regime.
Newscaster Bong Lapira went through several kinds of bell under Gregorian because he refused to have his credibility destroyed by reading OMA scripts. The last anyone heard of him, he was an itinerant peddler rather than sell out. Ninez Cacho-Olivares was originally a newscaster when she began to make faces over the outlandish claims of the Marcos regime which she was forced to read every night. She found herself again as a columnist of Business Day. The Radio Veritas boys like Orly Punzalan, Frankie Batacan, June Keithley, Fathers Ben, Larry and Guido, Harry Gasser and Bishop Buhain (I don’t know if I should call June a girl since Eddie Ramos promoted her to General) are of course familiar voices but new faces – they were silenced for a while and came back with voice and picture.
As I write this, Mr. Marcos has taken over the other TV stations and provincial radio stations and there still exist a likelihood that he may attempt a retake-over before the week is over. Even if he does, that momentary breath of freedom in media, in what was transformed into the most biased, most propagandistic monolith of disinformation ever conceived, is almost worth going to jail for – or even dying for.
***
If you think putting out a newspaper looks easy, try putting out a paper like the Inquirer during the Marcos regime. The other day, some of my UP journalism students must have fallen out of their seats when the saw the Inquirer with THREE headlines, two of them similar. Well, the store behind that issue is even more interesting. At the time we were putting the paper to bed, former Senator Ernie Maceda was in the office delivering a statement form Doy Laurel. One of his security men came in just as we had rematted and told Maceda that three Metrocom cars had just rounded the corner and stopped a few yards away. Maceda’s security men bundled him away, while we bundled our mats and smuggled them to another printing press. That’s why we never got a chance to correct the mass.
***
And one of the travails of an editor are mischievous deskmen who have nothing to do in between waiting for the fighting to break out. These deskmen invent all kinds of headlines and try to smuggle them into the dummy. Some of the more inventive ones:
“RONNIE NATHANIELSZ FLEES JOINS TAMILS IN SRI LANKA”;
“IGLESIA NI CRISTO BACKS CORY GOVERNMENT”;
“OPLE DEFECTS: JOINS WEBSTER DICTIONARY”;
“CENDENA ENROLLS IN HERBAL MEDICINE COLLEGE”;
“I’M STILL PRESIDENT, SAYS MARCOS, from Haiti”;
“MARCOS, DUVLIER BUY ST. HELENA ISLANS”;
“BATASAN RECOUNTS TALLY PROCLAIMS CORY-DOY”.
