PUNTO’S 6th anniversary came last week. Belatedly at that – April being its birth month – and still I failed to write anything about it.
Shame on me, the editor. It’s not writer’s block. It is damn dotage already starting to creep in on me.
For want of something to stir what is left of my drying creative juices, I rummaged through the body of work I accumulated through the years, fortunately saved in one terabyte external hard drive. Voila, here’s the perfect piece – published here on April 23, 2008 – on the occasion of our first anniversary.
As good – and relevant – then as now.
BEING AT odds with publishers/owners is a common predicament among editors. Including presumptive editors like me who adhere to the dictum: “Publish first, truth always, be damned later.”
Owners have their corporate interests to preserve, protect and promote which in many cases are at variance with the editor’s fundamental duty to publish Truth, no matter the cost.
No way is this more articulated than in Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers by James D. Squires, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune:
“The marriage of corporations and journalism is an unnatural, unhappy union. The best journalists are naturally skeptical individuals with a healthy disrespect for authority, pomposity and ruling classes.
They understand and appreciate the ideal of democracy that one man’s vote and voice are as important as another’s. And they have a well-honed apparatus for detecting two staples of the corporate culture – bullshit and insincerity.”
You would know who wears the pants in that unhappy union by merely browsing the pages of newspapers: the owner when his photographs pepper pages – yeah, there are publishers who love to publish themselves and their families too, down to the last grandson; when his business companies crowd legitimate news out of the pages, in effect reducing his paper to nothing more than a company journal.
The editor at the upper end? When everything is otherwise.
As in the early days of journalism, newspapers were published either to indulge the whims or caprices of the publisher, protect his interests, promote his businesses, or serve the political causes he espoused. Civic duty has always been alien to a number of publishers.
To paraphrase what I read somewhere, the title of the material I cannot immediately recall: If you told that kind of publisher that he had a duty to the public to print the news objectively and accurately, he would have asked what the duty some other kinds of businessmen had.
His newspaper being a business enterprise, news to him would be the same as cars to a Levi Laus, or house and lot to a Nestor Mangio, or tapa and tocino to a Lolita Hizon, even halo-halo and pancit luglug to a Razon.
News then is no more than a commodity to sell, a product to be packaged and presented in whatever way that would be most appealing to his customers and thus would bring him most profit.
Thank the heavens that the publishers of Punto! are not of this kind.
Commercial viability and editorial integrity are not mutually exclusive though.
This is best exemplified by The New York Times, unarguably the number one newspaper in the world.
This I read somewhere too. At the time of World War II, faced with newsprint rationing, the Ochs and Sulzberger families who owned The New York Times chose to print news over advertising, thereby sacrificing much-needed revenues that the latter offered.
This act though established their paper’s moral superiority over all other newspapers in America.
With The New York Times emerging – and remaining until today – as the most influential newspaper in the USA, if not the world, the decision of the owners proved to be good business too. High-mindedness returned better profits in the long run, so the moral lesson of The New York Times story instructs us.
Perhaps, our publishers read that same story. Hence their express policy of editorial integrity first, profitability second.
Thank you for the privilege of writing in this paper. Here’s hoping it will always stay that way, Sirs — Doc Leo Lazatin and GM Bong Endona.
INDEED, six years hence, at Punto! it has stayed that way. Else, I would not be here. Not only writing but also editing this paper.
