Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
The last time Lina and I chatted was only a month ago. She wanted me to join her for a journalism event slated in Mindanao next year. Of course I said yes. Silliman and Dumaguete will miss you, Lina. Thank you for being a gentle guide when I was going through my own mental health crisis during the pandemic.
Lina Sagaral Reyes was a poet and journalist. She was born on 6 July 1961 in Villalimpia, Bohol, which according to her was a "a village of blacksmiths, nipa thatchers, fishers, carpenters, a few teachers, sailors and other professionals, and women who live on their own."
She moved to Dumaguete City and took courses in Journalism and Creative Writing at Silliman University between 1978 and 1983, and made the distinction of being the first female student elected as President of the SU Student Government. In 1987, she was diagnosed with a disease, which doctors claimed would take her life in two years. She wrote furiously in this time, and was quite prolific — but she outlived the diagnosis, and she returned to Bohol, reclaimed her parents' house, and transformed it into the office of the Center for Creative Women. She began researching on the life stories of creative women in villages for the Writers Involved in Creative Cultural Alternatives [WICCA]. She won the Palanca Award for her poetry in 1987 [first prize, for “(Instead of a Will These) For All the Loved Ones”] and then in 1990 [third prize, for “Istorya”]. She would author the poetry collection, Honing Weapons, published by Lunhaw Books in 1987. Another collection, ‘Storya, was published in 1993 by the Babaylan Women's Publishing Collective and the Institute of Women's Studies of St. Scholastica's College.
As a journalist, she wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Mindanao Gold Star Daily, and often reported on the intersection between gender, the environment, climate change, culture, the arts, and mental health. As one of the directors of the The Cagayan de Oro Press Club Journalism Institute, she fostered collaborations with other organizations and drafted programs to enhance the media community. In 1998 she received the Jaime V. Ongpin Award for Investigative Journalism, for an expose on sand dredging to accommodate an international resort. In 2000 she received the National Science and Technology Journalism Grand Prize for an investigation into an algal bloom in Macajalar Bay, and in 2020 her in-depth probe into corporate pineapple farms and their questionable carbon-negative claims won her the Globe Media Excellence Awards.
She died on 14 December 2024.
Here’s a poem by Lina from her Palanca-winning collection, ‘Storya, in 1990:
Here’s a poem in tribute to Lina by Adonis Durado:
And another poem in tribute to Lina by Elio Garcia:
This is the last shot of Maria Schrader’s She Said [2022], the new film detailing the New York Times’ efforts to write the story of Harvey Weinstein’s years-long sexual misconduct towards a variety of women — a groundbreaking journalistic effort that ignited a social movement, and led to many reforms in the workplace. This last shot gave me goosebumps: a simple close-up of a cursor hovering over a computer monitor and about to press the “publish” button. It’s powerful, and its towering significance is in its symbolism, which has resonance: that simple act of pushing the button is the grand finality of all that takes place before in this film [and in the real-life reporting of journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor]. Trying to get all the facts right. Trying to convince all the women to put their accounts on record despite fears of a massive backlash from a very powerful figure. Trying to navigate the messy background investigation of someone who has all the powers [legal, financial, etc.] at his disposal to discredit everything that is reported. But dogged determination by two investigative reporters somehow made what seemed impossible possible.
I love this film. And I find the muted response to this by both critics and audiences alike to be ... well, cowardly. So I boo everyone who gives this film less than 4 stars — that centrist tendency [not wanting to appear over-enthusiastic over a polemical film with clear leftist/humanist agenda] is one of the things that this film wants to fight. [Carey Mulligan’s Megan Twohey says something like, “I’m afraid we won’t be believed,” or something to that effect. And she’s right! Mulligan is perfect, by the way. ] It’s a solid film, comparable to All the President’s Men, Spotlight, and The Post, but does its brand of cinematic journalism its own way. That it actually features some of the real actresses [Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow] behind the story is also a plus.
I wish we had this kind of bravery in local journalism. But we are too afraid to confront power, especially when it’s deep and murderous. I too am complicit in that.
Had to block a beloved former teacher on FB today. They once taught me the value of asking questions, delving deep, and trying to be comprehensive in our reportage — but perhaps in their anger at current issues, they’ve asked me to abandon the journalistic principles they’d once espoused in my effort to do narrative reportage. I don’t blame them, but incivility in comments [accusing me of being “bayaran” for interviewing the principal figure in the issue] is something I can only take so much. For their sake and mine, unfriending is perhaps the only recourse.
Maghinay-hinay ra ko, please. I’ve already written 5,500 words on the subject pero grabe ka kulang gihapon, mao nang nahimo syang series. I’m slowly putting in pieces for a wide-ranging analysis nga kaya nako. In Part 1, I began by using cultural context and history. In Part 2, I’m trying to put in various examples of public works projects throughout history, with different purposes and different outcomes — with a bit of personal confessions. Wala pa gyud ko kaabot sa reclamation itself. I’m taking my time because I am realizing the issue is sooo complex — not just environmental and economic, but also cultural and political, including new inputs like an unbelievable Chinese incursion behind the scenes, the powerful opposition from so many groups even including the BTS Army, a specific entry of a particular urban planner I cannot mention, etc. I’ve always believed in journalism that takes a stand, but arriving at it by not seeing things in black and white, by being able to see the nuances, and by being able to connect all the widespread dots. Ganahan ko maka-answer sa “why,” a question that’s often left out in journalism. Ngano mang isog kaayo ta sa plano? [Pero naa pud uban nga sige’g “Change is essential to progress.” Tinuod ba?] Ngano mang na-entertain man ni ni Ipe nga plano? Unsa sa Dumaguete og sa pagka-Dumagueteño naka-resulta aning isyuha? Kapoy baya, pero feeling nako kinahanglan.
One of the last photos of Dumaguete Vice Mayor Alan Cordova has him in Tanjay for a bike-a-thon. The latest issue of MetroPost is full of obituaries and think pieces about him and our loss, which is really telling how he was received by the Dumaguete community: a maverick who looked down at the casual corruption and ineptitude of some people in public offices. (One or two of those people also posted obits in the paper to honor him, which is ironic.)
[85th of 100]. I never thought of including documentaries in this list, because that felt like another list deserving of its own spotlight. Truth to tell, my favorite documentaries number beyond a hundred, and I actually do have a stronger preference for non-fiction. I thought that including this tradition of cinema in this list might eclipse narrative film altogether -- but nearing the tail-end of this endeavour, I've realized what a taxing, if also rewarding, exercise this has been, and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to do the same for documentary films. And so I am placed in the most excruciating of positions: to choose just one favorite among the many. I could go the classic route and choose Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat or Nanook of the North or Man With a Movie Camera. Or I could go for the iconic and choose Grey Gardens or Woodstock or Salesman or the Up Series. Or I could go to the poetic and choose Baraka or Nostalgia for the Light or Microcosmos or Aquarela or Last and First Men or Honeyland. Or I could go for the strange and choose The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On or Gates of Heaven or Catfish. Or I could go for the historical and choose Last Days of Vietnam or The Act of Killing or The Kingmaker or Batas Militar or The Missing Picture or Night & Fog or Shoah. Or I could go for the scientific and choose A Brief History of Time or Aliens of the Deep. Or I could go for personal chronicles of uncommon or disrupted lives and choose As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty or Sunday Beauty Queen or Capturing the Friedmans or Stories We Tell or Three Identical Strangers. Or I could go for hero-making biographies such as Citizen Jane: Battle for the City or RBG or I Am Not Your Negro. Or I could go for the observational and choose At Berkeley or Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Or I could go for the controversial and go for Olympia or Mondo Cane or The Thin Blue Line or Roger & Me or Deliver Us From Evil or Jesus Camp or An Inconvenient Truth or Waltz With Bashir or Hail, Satan? or The Terrorists or The Aristocrats or The Cove or Super Size Me. Or I could go for the delightful and choose Spellbound or Wordplay or Kedi or March of the Penguins. Or I could go for the suspenseful and choose Free Solo. Or I could go for the intellectual and choose Derrida or Public Speaking or Regarding Susan Sontag. I love films about gay concerns, and I could choose The Celluloid Closet or Paris is Burning or Before Stonewall or The Times of Harvey Milk or Tickled or The Case Against 8. I love films about artists in pursuit of their craft, and I could easily go for Jiro Dreams of Sushi or Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse or City of Gold or Exit Through the Gift Shop or Style Wars or Helvetica or De Palma or Everything is Copy: Nora Ephron, Scripted and Unscripted or Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold or What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael or Waking Sleeping Beauty or Seymour: An Introduction or Cutie and the Boxer or Hitchcock/Truffaut or The Price of Everything or Shirkers or Unzipped or Madonna: Truth or Dare or Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry or Spielberg or Six by Sondheim or Ballet 422 or Pina or Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel or Jodorowky's Dune or Man on Wire or Becoming Mike Nichols or The Kid Stays in the Picture or Mori: The Artists Habitat or Bill Cunningham New York or The First Monday in May or Finding Vivian Maier or The Decline of Western Civilization or The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness or Tim's Vermeer or Faces, Places or Filmworker or Crumb. Do you see what I mean? It's an impossibility, so I'll choose something that I've found myself perpetually delighted by even in repetition -- and if you've noticed, I have a particular weakness for documentaries about artistry and creatives. And I've chosen the 2009 documentary by R.J. Cutler about the making of Vogue Magazine's heftiest, and most sought after, monthly issue. I love the film because it is ostensibly a work documentary following American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour -- clearly her personal response to The Devil Wears Prada, the fictional expose, in book and subsequent film adaptation, that dared bear her alleged workplace toxicity. But in following their subject around as she goes through the grind of finishing the most demanding issue of the year, the film finds itself becoming a treatise about staying true to one's artistic vision under the heels of pedestrian and commercial concerns. It makes that turn when it discovers editor Grace Coddington, the perfect foil to Wintour and her struggles to juggle the demands of the bottomline, editing just enough of the artistry to populate the meager page counts with, and staying right ahead or on top of the cutting edge of fashion's many dicta. It is clearly not an enviable job, and I can understand the icy stance Wintour puts on, perhaps as shield to the hard editorial decisions she has to make. But this also makes out Coddington as the free-spirit art director, always fighting for more pages for her truly remarkable fashion photos, and always trying to subvert the fashion world's expectations. [On hearing that Wintour has ordered the pot belly of the film's cameraman -- who was used as minor subject in one of the magazine's approved photo shoots -- be airbrushed, Coddington quickly calls the art department for it to refrain from doing so. "We need this to be realistic," she tells the camera.] That push and pull between Wintour and Coddington is all the more interesting because it is not really antagonistic, but more of a strange kind of complementary. As Coddington would confess to the camera: "She knows how to push me, and I know how to push her." The film also has a special allure for me because it is also a story of journalism -- magazine-making is a very special niche -- and it has allowed me a sobering look into the hard work of creating those glossy pages. It informs me above all that the primary qualification of a good editor is really singular vision-keeping. I once worked for an editor who was too timid, and lacked a strong editorial voice: her way of managing her staff was to take in everyone's suggestions and ideas without really processing if they worked together. The resulting publication was a terrible hodgepodge that defied description. This film taught me the fine balance between editorial firmness and artistic flight. What's the film?
The latest episode of Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj on Netflix—about the gradual death of local newspapers [reasons: Facebook and Google are sucking up all ad revenues, and private equity firms are bleeding them dry] and the quick spread of lies and fake news through social media [e.g., that horrid Plandemic documentary]—is so enlightening and depressing at the same time.
[16th of 100]. There are many fantastic films about the heroism of journalism in the face of assorted peril [All The President's Men, The Paper, Spotlight, The Post] and even some about its frailties [Absence of Malice, Shattered Glass, Ace in the Hole, Network] -- but the one that seemed to get under its skin the most is this film. It follows three broadcast journalists working for a major network -- a brilliant but prickly reporter, an ace producer, and a charming but unproven anchor -- and not only give us a kind of love triangle, but also a brilliant observation on the mechanics of the work, and what people would do to get the story and tell it well for the public good. It is also an incisive comedy of manners, and I think the film played a major part in my late teen's new dream to pursue journalism. And taking the film's cue, sometimes I just cry for no reason just to breathe. What's the film?
This is Margalit Fox, staff writer for The New York Times, who writes obits for the paper. She is my favorite talking head in Vanessa Gould's documentary Obit (2016), her feature film debut on obituary writing.
[Aside #1: Gould first impressed me with her short subject documentary Between the Folds, which was about the art of paper-folding, an engrossing film.]
[Aside #2: I love the obituaries of the New York Times; have been a fan of the section for years. They're such compelling essays, and I always seek them out when a favorite person of mine -- a writer, an actor, etc. -- dies.]
I love Fox in the film because she gives the most rounded insights, like: "It's counterintuitive, perhaps, but obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life." How do you make a documentary about death fun and compelling? Gould found a way: celebrate life.
I was watching this trailer for a documentary on the evolution of graphic design, and it made me think. Sometimes I'm struck with what for me is the relief of being born at the right time, especially when it comes to the digital divide of generations. In journalism/publishing, for example, I was editor-in-chief of The Junior Sillimanian (the high school paper) in 1991, right around the time things were starting to go digital. Our first issue for the year was something assembled through the help of the old linotype machine, a huge contraption with a keyboard upfront and a boiler at the back that essentially "cooked" on the spot the metallic letters you typed in which you then assembled by hand to make metallic impressions for each page of the paper. By the second issue, we were using a desktop, the print resembling dot matrix letters that smelled of the future. In terms of desktop publishing, I started doing page design using Aldus Pagemaker which became Adobe Pagemaker which became InDesign, each change in platform requiring enormous will power for reeducation. (I hated InDesign when it first came out. Now I can't live without it.) When I was in college, we were assigned a journalism teacher who made us do headline writing by counting type -- there was a mathematical formula, and all -- which was the way they did it before the digital shattered best practices in journalism and design. I found that class incredibly sad, to be "taught" by someone who clearly didn't know what was current. She didn't last the semester. I can't remember who she was, and I don't know where she is, but she has since become the voice at the back of my head always warning me, "Keep up, keep up. Don't get stuck in the old ways of doing things. The moment you start complaining about new platforms -- I hate blogging, I hate Facebook, I hate Twitter, I hate Instagram, I hate Snapchat, etc. -- that's the moment you become old and irrelevant." It's a harsh reminder that's not entirely true, but it helps keeping me on my toes.
Once a year, on a day in September, I begin the daunting task of packaging tidbits of information that make my stomach queasy, and proceed to put them up one by one in Facebook and Twitter—complete with photos and complete with research and links—in a meticulously paced posting that allows for the entire run of the hours in the day. It is a flood of dark information, and sometimes I cry over them.
But it is only one day, and once a year at that, and it has to be done.
What is that day?
It is the day we came to know the number 1081.
It is the proclamation number with which Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, former Philippine dictator and the boogeyman of our collective historical nightmares, plunged the entire country into martial rule.
By the time it was over twenty long years later, the numbers had to be crunched, and the numbers do not lie. According to a report made by Amnesty International shortly after the EDSA Revolution happened, after the imposition of Martial Law, 70,000 people were arrested, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,240 were killed by the military and the police, all with the blessings of a despot who wanted to stay infinitely in absolute power.
What do they say about absolute power again?
So why do I do this social media barrage? Because more than forty years after 23 September 1972, that day of infamy, there is a different battle going on, and it is a battle for the Filipino soul. On one hand, there is memory—but one that is not meticulously kept, for certain reasons that underscore a Filipino frailty (which is a cultural forgetfulness). On the other hand, there are the claws of revisionism. And it is a revisionism that is being waged, soul by soul, in the murky landscape of the Internet. Every few days, we see posts of some young person questioning whether the darkness of those years was truly darkness. Perhaps you are mistaken, we are told by them. And I am perfectly all right with the act of questioning the writing of a history, which is—as we like to say—always written by the so-called victors. But what if what is being questioned belittles the blood that had been spilled in the name of your freedom? What if what is being questioned is a national nightmare that has been twisted by a grammar of lies that aim to render it more like a reverie? Do we question, for example, the horrors of the Holocaust in World War II? That idea is preposterous, but it has happened. There are Holocaust deniers existing in the world. They are the very shadows of evil.
According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, that revisionism for Martial Law began in 2011 with a YouTube video made by a certain “Baron Buchokoy” who purported to reveal the “hidden truths” about EDSA. The video became viral, and most of all, young people lapped it up.
Reacting to the popularity of this video in 2012, Mon Casiple, then executive director of the Institute for Political and Economic Reform, seemed prophetic in the assessment that he gave, where he underlined what could be causing this rash of revisionism: “We did an analysis of the textbooks in the Philippines. For the period covering martial law, there was a deafening silence by the textbooks on the human rights violations. They treated it like an ordinary period of any presidential term. Edsa was never given a special place.” In other words, generations of young people after 1986 have never been properly taught about the evils of Martial Law.
Casiple also said that Buchokoy’s video tapped into the yearning and frustrations of the youth for a better life, and that after hearing all the promises of EDSA from older generations, many young people might be feeling alienated: “They see that there are the same problems like corruption. What tie them together are aspirations, but there is a twist. They go by the results, not the process. If that trend is not reversed, in a few years, we will have a majority of voters who did not go through that period, and who therefore, will be susceptible to videos like this.”
Well, it took only three years. Now, too many young people—especially those of the generation born after EDSA—think that Marcos was a maligned hero. That rattles me.
Because he and his wife Imelda were never heroes, and their evil in fact took many gradations—depending entirely on who they could easily dispose of. The great writer Nick Joaquin, for example, absolutely detested Imelda Marcos and only accepted the National Artist for Literature award from her as an instrument to free the poet and journalist Pete Lacaba from jail. But after being thus honored as National Artist, Joaquin used his position to work for intellectual freedom. It is said that in one ceremony held at Mount Makiling, which was attended by the First Lady, Joaquin gave an invocation to the mountain’s mythical maiden, and used it to talk about the importance of freedom and the artist. Imelda was not pleased. After that incident, he was excluded by the Marcos regime from speaking in many important cultural events. Joaquin nonetheless was given better treatment because of his literary stature.
Other writers, less legendary than Joaquin, fared worse. There’s the poet Emmanuel Lacaba, Pete’s brother. Ed Maranan writes about him once: “Acclaimed while still alive as one of the best Filipino writers of his generation, Eman Lacaba and his guerrilla comrades were killed and disposed of [on 18 March 1976 in Davao del Norte] with the brutal dispatch and cruelty that became the trademark of the Marcos constabulary. Days after receiving information that Eman was with an NPA group that had been slain by government troops and hastily buried in an unmarked grave, relatives and friends were finally able to reach the Tagum municipal cemetery in Davao escorted by soldiers. Mendez Ventura recounts the discovery: ‘The cemetery caretaker led them to a paupers' grave where he remembered having seen four bodies dumped side by side, minus coffin or wrapping paper, about two weeks before. The grave was shallow, the better to dig out any corpse a relative might wish to claim. Marks of his friend's posthumous degradation drove Freddie (Salanga, another writer) to near-hysterical tears. Eman’s hands and ankles were tied with rope, and the flesh on his back had been macerated by the rocky terrain over which he had been dragged like a dead cow.’”
But that’s a rebel, you say. He was with the NPA, you say. Well, then, consider the case of 14-year-old Luis ‘Boyet’ Mijares, the son of Primitivo Mijares who worked for Marcos before he got the ire of Kokoy Romualdez, Imelda’s brother. Mr. Mijares exiled himself to the U.S. and wrote a scathing expose in a book titled The Conjugal Dictatorship. He later was made to disappear—one of our desaparechos. On May 1977, the body of his teenage son Boyet was found dumped outside Manila, his eyeballs protruding, his chest perforated with multiple stab wounds, his head bashed in, and his hands, feet and genitals mangled—Marcos’ punishment to the family.
But things were good under Martial Law, you say.
Let me put it this way. Marcos’ system of crony capitalism had the illusion of sheen, and it can be said indeed that between 1972 and 1976, the Philippines seemed to be prospering. Its exports were rising, and everybody seemed happy. (This is the “period of prosperity” our revisionists love talking about.) The corruption, however, was deeply entrenched, perfumed only by massive propaganda that declared a “smiling Martial Law” or a “benevolent dictatorship.” But by 1977, world affairs—in particular the start of hostilities in the Middle East—moved in such a way that soon revealed the maggots that were hiding beneath that illusion of prosperity. By 1980, the economy was collapsing, and we owed US$10 billion to the World Bank and IMF—a debt, plus interest, that we are still paying today because of Marcos’ bad government policies. It was the Filipino people who suffered from those policies, not the Marcoses who squirrelled away their kickbacks in secret bank accounts and ostentatious property purchases.
One can honestly say that almost everything that ails the Philippines today you can trace back to the Marcoses. The current culture of corruption? It became systemised under Marcos, with his vast network of cronies, where family and close friends benefitted from the spoils of a nation under paralysis. The current culture of dirty electioneering? It sprang from the never-before-seen massive frauds in the elections of 1972 and 1978. The current problems in Mindanao? It sprang from the Jabidah massacre, in Marcos' crazy bid to get Sabah from Malaysia. The longest-running communist insurgency in the world? Marcos’ shenanigans strengthened it. The current Aquino administration’s apathy towards the arts and culture? It seems to come from a genuine desire to counter Imelda’s twisted sense of “love and beauty.” The current marriage of showbiz and politics? Think of Imelda singing in all of his campaigns, and see that as the instance where see the cementing of the idea that you don’t win Philippine elections by platform or service; you win by entertainment.
Of course, all of the above will be denied by the fervent Marcosians in our midst. They are playing the literal Devil’s advocates—and they know how to twist things, the way Imelda has been twisting things all her life post-exile. “Not a single person was killed during Martial Law,” she candidly tells the camera in Ramona Diaz’s 2003 documentaryImelda. And you know she’s lying through her teeth—but she believes wholeheartedly her deception.
Let them be.
Let us remember, but let them be. One rule for sanity is to never argue with fools. When they sing their lies, don’t respond. Just whistle. But remember.
Never again.
~~~
Watch Batas Militar (below), still the most compelling documentary about Martial Law ever. If you are a Filipino and you love this country, you owe it to yourself to watch this at least once in your life. Those interview clips of Imelda's strange pronouncements juxtaposed immediately by images and sound that underscore her delusions and lies still make my blood boil.
And read up and wise up! There's a rich literature on the Martial Law and its aftermath. Don't let cultural amnesia take over for good.
I managed to fully cover only two years in my research today. But what fruitful years they were! 1947-1948, I am beginning to think, were the years that literary culture in Silliman really began flexing its muscle. Claro R. Ceniza, more than any other young writer of that time in Dumaguete, was the consummate campus poet, churning one poem after another, rivalled only by Teofilo Marasigan who wrote a vast amount of poetry in Filipino, and German Montenegro, who did the same in Spanish. Edilberto Tiempo was already in Iowa since 1946, and Edith Tiempo [who wrote the popular "Vignette" column in The Sillimanian] would soon follow. As of 1947, she was still publishing poems of Romantic nature, like "Song of the Druid Maid," which first saw print in the 14 February 1947 issue of The Sillimanian. In 1947, Rodrigo T. Feria [who came to Silliman with Dolores Stephens Feria] was also installed as the new adviser of the campus paper, and he effectively scrambled the old ways of doing campus and city journalism, leading to some upheavals that made 1948 a peculiar year -- there was no official editorial staff for the paper, which led to the Journalism class taking over its functions, with a revolving set of editors for almost every issue published that year. Aida Rivera [Ford] first made her presence felt in 1948, the same year Miss Silliman [then known as Miss Popularity] was founded. Also that same year, Cesar J. Amigo's “Who Live in the Night” [which was first published in Sunday Times Magazine] was considered by Manila Chronicle's This Week Magazine as one of the best stories of 1948. Rivera and Amigo became the first editors of Sands & Coral, the new literary folio, which everyone described as a "quiet campus affair" that for some reason took the national literary scene by storm. That first issue somehow made quite a stir in Manila, leading to some prominent writers hailing it as Silliman's definite contribution to Philippine letters. NVM Gonzalez even wrote the staff, congratulating them on "a job well done." Ricaredo Demetillo started contributing poetry as well, and one of the campus literary finds was a certain Mamerto M. Espina, whose story “Matchsticks for the Suicide Squad” impressed everyone with its masterful prose.
I get why this happens. It has happened before. What most people don't get is that, unlike TV or radio or the Internet where breaking news can happen, newspapers are physical objects in need of systematic circulation that need specific deadlines to run -- and if you are a national newspaper, that's a lot of circulation to consider.
If a story is imminent, newspapers make a template of what could possibly happen, run with it, and hope for the best. (Major newspapers, for example, have an active obituary staff who write every important persons' obituaries, with constant updates, long before these people are dead. So that when death does come, the writers just fill in the blanks regarding the specifics -- and voila, instant publication only minutes after the announcement.) It is all done in the name of scoop and/or timeliness.
This is not a story of bad journalism. This is a story of how one medium of news may no longer be suitable for the times we are living in. Most of the time, editorial hunches for imminent news stories are correct -- but sometimes it does spell disaster, like the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline of Chicago Tribune in 1948. Shouting "Stop the press!" happens only in movies. (But I do wish these newspapers have the prescience of that newspaper in the film Chicago. In that scene near the end, the newsboys await the verdict for Roxie Hart's murder charge, with two headlines ready for the selling: "Guilty!" says one version, "Innocent!" says another. They get the proper go-signal from the courthouse -- and one version of the newspaper vanishes instantly into the truck. But this happens only in movies.
To quote the great Alain de Botton in The News: A User's Manual: "... The stories we take in were decided not by supernatural decree after a conclave of angels but by a group of usually rather weary and pressured editors struggling to assemble a plausible list of items in harried meetings in corner offices over muffins and coffee. Their headlines don't constitute an ultimate account of reality so much as some first hunches as to what might matter by mortals prey to the same prejudices, errors and frailties as the rest of us, hunches plucked out of a pool of several billion potential events that daily befall our species."
Which makes me think: in the age of instant gratification, news do run better now in social media (where errors are necessarily less forgivable), especially if you need your news like you need your instant coffee. Newspapers may not be dead yet (and I hope they don't die off like the dinosaurs), but as a medium of news in the age of breaking news via Twitter, it is truly showing its creaky joints.
Sunday Inquirer Magazine is ending its long, illustrious run -- and I'm sad because this rag was a huge part in my growing up years. I remember its comics section by Jess Abrera fondly, and the amazing longform stories by Lorna Kalaw Tirol, Ceres Doyo, and Constantino Tejero, whose series on censorship in Philippine movies was the lynchpin source for my research paper on the subject in high school, and later on in college. Then there was the long-running annual series on Palanca winners by Ruel De Vera, perhaps the only magazine at that time to take Filipino writers seriously. (Yep, it was that kind of magazine.) This was the publication we aspired to write for when I was a Mass Communication student in Silliman University, and the first time my byline saw print in its pages was in 1999, right after I graduated, and thanks largely to one of its editors Alya. Honasan, who I met backstage at the Luce Auditorium where she was performing in Floy Quintos' And St. Louis Loves Dem Filipinos where we quickly established rapport over some astonishment. I would consider that my first break in national publication -- which just goes to show opportunity happens when you allow it to happen. Here's Ruey with his message regarding SIM's last issue: "Thank you for believing that there is still a place in the Philippine publishing landscape for the lovely longform story. It has been a privilege to tell these stories for you. There will never be anything like the Sunday Inquirer Magazine—and that’s really the way it should be. Accept no substitutes."
Watching Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler (2014) reminded me -- in a very painful way -- why I never pursued journalism as a career, although it was my major in college. I graduated in 1999 with a mass communication degree with some Latin honours attached to it, and promptly got the job -- I knew it was going to be a temporary thing -- as editor-in-chief of a regional newspaper. Around the time, I was also fielding offers to work in a Makati bank (I still wonder how they got my resume), among others. This included an offer to become the regional news director for The Manila Times, which was going through a terrible reshuffling at that time -- which was perhaps they were willing to take on a greenhorn like me. The job meant I had to be based in Cebu City, and then pursue and direct hard stories in the name of news. For some reason, I just could not see myself doing it. I turned it down. Back in journalism school, I hated the grind of covering the police beat, and I hated having to run after politicians, criminals, and other newsmakers to get my sound byte in order to beat the 3 p.m. deadline. Watching this new film reminded me about that pursuit. But it was also something else quite entirely. Nightcrawler is a mindfucker of a movie, and by the end of it, I found myself delirious and uneasy over what it wanted to say.
What exactly is Nightcrawler? Is it a contemporary film noir, living off the muck of Los Angeles urban crime? Is it a diatribe against tabloid journalism and its blurring of morality in newsmaking? Is it a procedural over how to be ingenious and crafty enough to get the footage you want that's "fit" for the morning news and primed for ratings bonanza? Is it a study of sociopathic behaviour? Is it an illustration over how to build a business from the ground up, throwing in chutzpah and business school rhetoric as major ingredients for success? Is it the perfect embodiment of what Austin Kleon once said about how to make it as an artist: "Fake it till you make it"?
I guess this is all of that. Jake Gyllenhaal -- who is incredibly wiry and scarecrowy as the sociopathic Lou Bloom -- plays a "nightcrawler," which is industry lingo for those independent "news gatherers" that hover over police scanner dispatches to get to scenes of crime just in time to capture graphic footage of what's happening. These they serve up to directors of TV news, who pay them piecemeal -- and more if the footage happens to be bloodier, or more exclusive, than the rest. The interesting about Lou Bloom is that he stumbles into this career quite by accident. He starts out as some petty thief, and chances upon Bill Paxton's nightcrawler in an accident -- and gets fascinated by what he sees. He is intrepid and smart, he is business-savvy, he is hungry for relevance, and he learns fast. And soon he starts making a name for himself as the topnotch go-to guy in his field, with much thanks to Rene Russo's Nina, a news director of a lowly TV station who recognises in Lou a kindred spirit, and who shares a preponderancy for brushing aside moral dilemmas for the sake of a story. This is basically a rags-to-success story for Lou Bloom, but it's a film that has none of that Horatio Alger sentimentality. We are asked to sympathise with a conniving, cold-blooded creature who will sacrifice anything and anyone to be good at his job. What unsettles is that we actually find everything that Lou does to be logical and honest. He is good.
But is that ever enough?
I'm glad I quit the news job before it could ensnare me into this kind of dilemma. It's hyperbolic, of course, but with the news the way it is right now, I'm not sure the hyperbole in the film is even unreal anymore.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism went to the streets of Manila to ask college students what they know about the 1986 People Power revolt. Here's the video of what they found out:
I think it's true for any struggle. One fights for a cause -- and sometimes is even killed -- to secure the future of the next generation -- who will never ever remember, much less appreciate, the pain you had to undergo to give them that freedom to be ... complacent and forgetful.
That's one of life's biggest ironies.
Here's a true story. Once, many years ago, after my Philippine literature class, after giving my students homework to read up on specific poems by Emmanuel Lacaba, Merlie Alunan, and Ruben Cuevas (Pete Lacaba) in preparation for our discussion on Martial Law literature, a student approached me and asked: "Sir, who's Marshall, and why does he have a law?" To say that my heart sank is understating the impact of my realization: people forget their history fast.
Here's another true story from the mid-1990s. This was during the Final Question Round of a famous -- and very prestigious -- university pageant. The girls were smart, most of them beautiful. I was there that night in the audience, and the question was about Ninoy Aquino. The well-coifed candidate from Mass Communication looked around the venue and finally said: "I'm sorry but I don't know who Ninoy is." Then the host -- another girl, a former beauty titlist herself -- also looked around, and said, "I don't know either." And both stood there, in the middle of the stage, for what seemed like forever, while the entire place gasped at the unexpected spectacle, until finally one of the pageant advisers -- Kuya Moe to all of us -- rushed to the stage and gave the girls, and everyone else, a quick history lesson.
Let's all quote George Santayana now: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes."
The Russians sank a Hong Kong freighter last month, killing the seven Chinese seamen on board. We can live with that—Lenin and Stalin were once the ideological mentors of all Chinese people. The Japanese planted a flag on Diàoyú Island. That’s no big problem—we Hong Kong Chinese love Japanese cartoons, Hello Kitty, and shopping in Shinjuku, let alone our round-the-clock obsession with karaoke.
But hold on—even the Filipinos? Manila has just claimed sovereignty over the scattered rocks in the South China Sea called the Spratly Islands, complete with a blatant threat from its congress to send gunboats to the South China Sea to defend the islands from China if necessary. This is beyond reproach. The reason: there are more than 130,000 Filipina maids working as $3,580-a-month cheap labor in Hong Kong. As a nation of servants, you don’t flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter.
As a patriotic Chinese man, the news has made my blood boil. I summoned Louisa, my domestic assistant who holds a degree in international politics from the University of Manila, hung a map on the wall, and gave her a harsh lecture. I sternly warned her that if she wants her wages increased next year, she had better tell every one of her compatriots in Statue Square on Sunday that the entirety of the Spratly Islands belongs to China.
Grimly, I told her that if war breaks out between the Philippines and China, I would have to end her employment and send her straight home, because I would not risk the crime of treason for sponsoring an enemy of the state by paying her to wash my toilet and clean my windows 16 hours a day. With that money, she would pay taxes to her government, and they would fund a navy to invade our motherland and deeply hurt my feelings.
Oh yes. The government of the Philippines would certainly be wrong if they think we Chinese are prepared to swallow their insult and sit back and lose a Falkland Islands War in the Far East. They may have Barack Obama and the hawkish American military behind them, but we have a hostage in each of our homes in the Mid-Levels or higher. Some of my friends told me they have already declared a state of emergency at home. Their maids have been made to shout “China, Madam/Sir” loudly whenever they hear the word “Spratly.” They say the indoctrination is working as wonderfully as when we used to shout, “Long live Chairman Mao!” at the sight of a portrait of our Great Leader during the Cultural Revolution. I’m not sure if that’s going a bit too far, at least for the time being.
Chip Tsao is a best-selling author and columnist. A former reporter for the BBC, his columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.
8:01 AM |
Newspapers are Dead. Murdered by the Internet. Long Live Journalism!
As a Mass Communication graduate, I am fairly troubled by the current downturn in the industry when one journalist after another are fast losing their jobs -- even the New York Post's legendary gossip columnist Liz Smith lost hers! -- simply because the Internet is here to stay and nobody buys newspapers and magazines anymore. Will the newspaper industry survive? What happens to my other profession when it has been pronounced officially dead? (Well, dead, obviously.) If it doesn't survive, what replaces the old system? Gawker's Clay Shirky tells us that it pays to take a close look at the 1500s when the printing press revolution shattered an old world, and brought in a form of "chaos," similar to what we have right now. I like this part:
Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone -- covering every angle of a huge story -- to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; "You're gonna miss us when we're gone!" has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen.
And then the money paragraph...
Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
1:26 PM |
The One with the Constantly Surprised Look on Her Face and Needs to Lay Off on the Botox
It wasn't hard to miss Greta Van Susteren -- or The-One-With-the-Constantly-Surprised-Look-on-Her-Face-and-Needs-to-Lay-Off-on-the-Botox -- and her recent post-election interview with Sarah Palin in FoxNews for some reasons. Every conceivable news channel worth its salt in responsible journalism was covering, fervently, the attack on Mumbai, and here was FoxNews -- "We Report. You Decide." Whoopee -- doing such a loving, loving coverage of a certified political "old news." The difference in coverage was simply jarring.
And The-One-With-the-Constantly-Surprised-Look-on-Her-Face-and-Needs-to-Lay-Off-on-the-Botox's almost-bedroomy demeanor with the Alaskan governor was so gosh-worthy it bordered on the sapphic. "Have you eaten?" Greta asked Sarah somewhere in the interview, and then proceeded to Palin's kitchen, where both "palled around" (FoxNews' recent favorite term) like they were on a date. And Sarah went pa-cute and gave another one of those kilometric answers without periods or a point. I switched to CNN. There was new information about gunmen in Taj Mahal Hotel. I switched back to FoxNews, and the headline below Sarah's talking head went: "Gov. Palin talks about caribou and moose hunting."
Seriously, this is news?
FoxNews is the dumbest thing on television. I have a couple of good friends who work for "Fox & Friends" (and you know naman that I love you guys), but FoxNews is the dumbest thing on television. Which may be why every time I hear somebody confess that he or she watches FoxNews regularly, I have a tendency to give that person wide berth, avoid them like the plague. It's like admitting you're retarded, and are proud of it.
11:20 AM |
Lina Sagaral Reyes, 1961-2024
As a Mass Communication graduate, I am fairly troubled by the current downturn in the industry when one journalist after another are fast losing their jobs -- even the New York Post's legendary gossip columnist Liz Smith lost hers! -- simply because the Internet is here to stay and nobody buys newspapers and magazines anymore. Will the newspaper industry survive? What happens to my other profession when it has been pronounced officially dead? (Well, dead, obviously.) If it doesn't survive, what replaces the old system? Gawker's Clay Shirky tells us that it pays to take a close look at the 1500s when the printing press revolution shattered an old world, and brought in a form of "chaos," similar to what we have right now. I like this part: