IT STARTS with something innocuous, even ridiculous that we scoff and laugh at – like the Walang Punto! Central Lason masthead printed on a T-shirt as featured in our Jan. 21 issue.
Then it grows in intensity and seriousness, foisting clear and present danger to the practitioner. No laughing matter this time, terror having set in.
It ends in the horrific “termination with extreme prejudice.” The time for wailing and gnashing of teeth, for screams for justice – that the dead practitioner, as well as the much-alive authorities could not hear.
That is the cycle of media harassment. We know whereof we speak, having gone through it, and, fortunately, survived to tell the tale.
Of the same category as the Walang Punto! idiocy of some minion of the powers-that-be was the poison letter sent to my wife in 1988 detailing my supposed romantic dalliance with a junior accountant at our then-watering hole, Shanghai Restaurant, completed with comings and goings to various motels on board tricycles with the lady’s face always covered by the pages of The Angeles SUN, our paper then.
As though my “infidelities” were not enough to hurt the wife, the letter writer
who simple signed herself as “nagmamalasakit na waitress ng Shanghai” went on to prick at her ego too with the identification of my supposed significant other as “runner-up sa Mutya ning Angeles kaya higit siyang bata at maganda kaysa sa iyo.”
It was good the wife took my word against those of an anonymous rat.
The letter was postmarked Angeles City Hall, revealing the morons behind it.
On the second level – the harassment intensified – falls the experience of then hard-hitting commentator Sonny Lopez, yes,trhe same Lopez who is now public affairs manager of the Clark Development Corp.
Lopez was denouncing the unfinished city hall of Angeles in Barangay Pampang, calling it a poor version of the ruins of Rome, with nothing but the massive concrete posts erected at the cost of P19 million.
It was around this time too that the graffiti “Monkey Tong” appeared on city walls. That sounded too closely to Mang Quitong the nickname of then-Mayor Francisco Nepomuceno, the current mayor’s senior. So is there something foreboding here? Read on.
Soon after, stalkers hounded Lopez wherever he went. One night, on his way home, two motorcycles suddenly materialized from out of nowhere, flanked Rowena, Lopez’s storied owner-type jeep, the masked riders-in-tandem brandishing automatic weapons. And just as fast left Lopez alone.
A more direct harassment was the 1988 assault of the running dogs of then Mayor Antonio Abad Santos on station DZYA where Lopez and I were broadcasting live in our Tagamasid program. Yes, automatic weapons ranging from Taurus machine pistols to M-16 rifles were pointed on our heads even as we continued denouncing corruption in Angeles City.
“Termination with extreme prejudice” was indeed ordered on three Pampanga newsmen in 1988 too: Elmer Cato, then Sun publisher and correspondent of Manila Chronicle and Kyodo, now Third Secretary of the Philippine Mission at the United Nations; Lopez, then of Malaya and United Press International; and myself.
The order did not come from any politico though but from the head of the right-wing vigilante groups who suspected the three of us of comprising the propaganda unit of the urban partisan unit of the New People’s Army, the Mariano Garcia Brigade which figured in the so-called festival of killings in Angeles City in May-June 1988.
It was the timely intervention of friends from both the business community, notably furniture magnate Pert Cruz, and the police, Capt. Roman Lacap and Col. Amado T. Espino, Jr. that saved us from certain doom.
“Termination with extreme prejudice” came to full terms not with a media practitioner hereabouts but with the media itself.
Our Tagamasid program was yanked off the air after the assault on the radio station due to the pressure Abad Santos exerted on the DZYA management.
These are but a sampling of the harassment we had experienced. There were many, many more. A number of which I made part of my first book Of the Press (1999).
Veterans as we are to harassment, we have no immunity yet to its chilling effect. Duty however dictates that we stand up to it. Kaya, e na kayu mamatakut, ne po?
Then it grows in intensity and seriousness, foisting clear and present danger to the practitioner. No laughing matter this time, terror having set in.
It ends in the horrific “termination with extreme prejudice.” The time for wailing and gnashing of teeth, for screams for justice – that the dead practitioner, as well as the much-alive authorities could not hear.
That is the cycle of media harassment. We know whereof we speak, having gone through it, and, fortunately, survived to tell the tale.
Of the same category as the Walang Punto! idiocy of some minion of the powers-that-be was the poison letter sent to my wife in 1988 detailing my supposed romantic dalliance with a junior accountant at our then-watering hole, Shanghai Restaurant, completed with comings and goings to various motels on board tricycles with the lady’s face always covered by the pages of The Angeles SUN, our paper then.
As though my “infidelities” were not enough to hurt the wife, the letter writer
who simple signed herself as “nagmamalasakit na waitress ng Shanghai” went on to prick at her ego too with the identification of my supposed significant other as “runner-up sa Mutya ning Angeles kaya higit siyang bata at maganda kaysa sa iyo.”
It was good the wife took my word against those of an anonymous rat.
The letter was postmarked Angeles City Hall, revealing the morons behind it.
On the second level – the harassment intensified – falls the experience of then hard-hitting commentator Sonny Lopez, yes,trhe same Lopez who is now public affairs manager of the Clark Development Corp.
Lopez was denouncing the unfinished city hall of Angeles in Barangay Pampang, calling it a poor version of the ruins of Rome, with nothing but the massive concrete posts erected at the cost of P19 million.
It was around this time too that the graffiti “Monkey Tong” appeared on city walls. That sounded too closely to Mang Quitong the nickname of then-Mayor Francisco Nepomuceno, the current mayor’s senior. So is there something foreboding here? Read on.
Soon after, stalkers hounded Lopez wherever he went. One night, on his way home, two motorcycles suddenly materialized from out of nowhere, flanked Rowena, Lopez’s storied owner-type jeep, the masked riders-in-tandem brandishing automatic weapons. And just as fast left Lopez alone.
A more direct harassment was the 1988 assault of the running dogs of then Mayor Antonio Abad Santos on station DZYA where Lopez and I were broadcasting live in our Tagamasid program. Yes, automatic weapons ranging from Taurus machine pistols to M-16 rifles were pointed on our heads even as we continued denouncing corruption in Angeles City.
“Termination with extreme prejudice” was indeed ordered on three Pampanga newsmen in 1988 too: Elmer Cato, then Sun publisher and correspondent of Manila Chronicle and Kyodo, now Third Secretary of the Philippine Mission at the United Nations; Lopez, then of Malaya and United Press International; and myself.
The order did not come from any politico though but from the head of the right-wing vigilante groups who suspected the three of us of comprising the propaganda unit of the urban partisan unit of the New People’s Army, the Mariano Garcia Brigade which figured in the so-called festival of killings in Angeles City in May-June 1988.
It was the timely intervention of friends from both the business community, notably furniture magnate Pert Cruz, and the police, Capt. Roman Lacap and Col. Amado T. Espino, Jr. that saved us from certain doom.
“Termination with extreme prejudice” came to full terms not with a media practitioner hereabouts but with the media itself.
Our Tagamasid program was yanked off the air after the assault on the radio station due to the pressure Abad Santos exerted on the DZYA management.
These are but a sampling of the harassment we had experienced. There were many, many more. A number of which I made part of my first book Of the Press (1999).
Veterans as we are to harassment, we have no immunity yet to its chilling effect. Duty however dictates that we stand up to it. Kaya, e na kayu mamatakut, ne po?
