A case in point is the crime of passion – in the prejudgment of hardened police reporters like Standard’s Jess Malabanan – perpetrated in Angeles City over a week back.
Already given exhaustive coverage by the national and local media, I felt there was still something missed that would have given a deeper perspective to the case.
While Punto! scooped all media in its reportage of the suspect’s past conviction for attempted homicide – subsequently pursued aggressively by the TV media as though it were their own, it failed to fully back up the “history of crime” the news story insinuated upon the suspect.
After all, even the strongest circumstantial evidence tagging one a suspect in one felony, coming after a conviction for another, does not make a history of crime. There had to be at the least one more.
And in that one more is where we failed.
It was a gang rape of a poor Porac lass reported sometime within the decade of the attempted homicide case. One of the suspects bore the same name as the current object of the police manhunt. The rape story appeared in the papers of those days, but mysteriously, and quickly, disappeared.
Then as now, no story can be published detailing the “resolution” of the case “ransomed” by a powerful celebrity politician with P400,000 in cash and a tricycle. No, there was no sarisari store thrown into the deal, that being the modus of another politician of lesser rank.
Then as now, no one wanted to talk about it. Copies of the papers that reported the case have become rarer than the finest diamonds buried in the deepest mines.
Our failure to write and publish there not of our own making but caused by the refusal of all parties to the case to talk. An imposed silence that nevertheless warrants respect. Much to my regrets. As much – if not even more – to the relief of the celebrity-politician whose intervening kunsinti of the culprit would have exposed the shameless sham to his champion of the masa image.
Another case – almost but not quite criminal though – is that of the government corporate toughie challenging to a fistfight the manager of a business enterprise in his domain. This was over two months ago.
Ashley Manabat had the story: meeting between tigasin and the head honchos of a service facility over lease conditions turning into a heated exchange leading to the former standing up and daring the latter to a mano- amano ala Tondo.
Complete with the shrill sound bite:
“Suntukan na lang tayo!”
My regret for sacrificing the story not so much for the facts – Ashley had independent sources, not the least of whom the guy challenged, affirming to the veracity of the story – as for acquiescence to the request of the “offended” party for us not to further compound an already complicated situation.
If we persisted, push would have most assuredly come to shove – vulnerable as all the sources are to the brusqueness and bullying of tigasin – with our story ultimately being denied by them.
The resulting loss of credibility would have drowned us in abysmal regret.
On a weekly basis, we get swamped by torrents of stories about our pugilistic CEO. The positive, we dutifully publish as praise released by his office. The critical, so long as sourced and verified, we publish too, duly bylined or taglined. The stuff of legend – the raging verbal diarrhea of put_ina and puk__ina spewed upon his perceived enemies, the sexist remarks and sexual innuendoes on subordinates, the dangling propositions from unzipped flies in his
state of inebriation, to cite just the most lurid – unwritten. Precisely because…well, they make the stuff of legend. Best served with the pulutan in spirituous sprees. The newspaper being no rightful place for them. Else its reduction to nothing more than sheer yellow scandalmonger.
Unwritten, yes. But, in such cases, unregretted.
