PRESIDENT Noynoy Aquino had ample praise for the Manila business daily, BusinessWorld, at its 25th anniversary reception last week. In contrast, and within the same week, he had harsh words for TV Patrol anchor and former vice-president Noli de Castro at the ABS-CBN news program’s silver anniversary celebration. Both presidential comments were prompted by Aquino’s assessment of the quality of reportage delivered by Manila media.
Back in 1988, 24 years ago, I also had a problem with media reportage. It bothered me enough to prompt me to write about it and send the piece to Letty Locsin, then BusinessWorld managing editor. She not only agreed to print the article, she decided to make it the introductory piece of a new column, for which she also coined the title,Ad Lib.
Letty, who never hesitated to call a spade a sonnuvashovel, also translated the opening phrase, as gross as it already was, into Tagalog. To say that it shocked BusinessWorld’s sedate readers is an understatement.
I’m running that controversial piece to bring home the point that nothing much has changed in Philippine media.
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Salsalin mo! (Masturbate it!)
When you’re a journalism freshman groping your way in the real world of newspapering, this is the kind of advice that can shatter your idealism.
I had just joined the Manila Confidential, a tabloid not just because of its size but because of the kind of reportage it specialized in. It was a scandal sheet. One of several that were doing brisk business in Manila of the mid-fifties.The Eye. News Behind The News. Bullseye. You could hardly tell one from the other. The headlines were all similarly styled. Father Rapes Daughter. Big Stink At City Hall. Crooks In Congress. Star Runs Off With Bit Player.
To describe the stories as sensationalized would be an understatement. There was a certain viciousness in the way the most lurid, the most shocking occurrences were dug up from the police blotters, the halls of Congress and City Hall, the movie lots and nightclub row. It wasn’t enough to raise people’s eyebrows. They had to be given nightmares as well
But for all of life’s depravities, there just weren’t enough bona fide horror stories on the beat. So what was a young cub supposed to do?
Invent a story. Masturbate it. Conjure it from your wet dreams and from some demented comic strip.
If you were to walk the floor of any of the tabloid offices on deadline day, you would have slipped and slid from all that mental ejaculation.
Of course, it was always better to have a factual basis for a story. In that case, you only needed to distort it. Paint on the mascara. Nail on the horns. Clip on the tail. Voila! A monster of a scoop.
On my second week with The Confidential, I turned in an item about a jeepney driver’s wife who was raped and robbed by three men. The story came out on the front page with my by-line – “Jimmy de la Rosa Wife Raped, Robbed by Trio!”
I was stunned. Digging up my original manuscript, I realized what I had missed but which my eagle-eyed editor didn’t: the jeepney driver was a namesake of the famous movie star.
The paper was a sell-out. Partly due to my story. But also due to the juicy tales of shenanigans in high places, the merciless onslaughts of featured “calumnists” on public personalities, the salacious insights into private lives and, most of all, due to the perverted pleasure that our readers derived from what then was caustically referred to as “yellow journalism.”
Why were there tabloids in the first place?
Well, how else was an enterprising publisher to compete with the Manila Times? Even the Chronicle, Bulletin and the Herald weren’t getting enough advertising lineage. How was a paper to survive? Obviously, by putting out all the news that wasn’t fit to print.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, I came upon the editor-in-chief of one of the old tabloids. He waxed nostalgic over those days when he could send senators and congressmen to their knees in abject supplication, with the threat of an exposé. And how, at one time, he lashed with a vengeance at a very large corporation for a wrong that a personal friend had complained about. He leaked the rumor that a corpse was found in one of the vats of the soft drink brand owned by the firm. People stopped drinking the product.
Power. That’s what the tabloids gave. A few weeks after I joined the paper, I was assigned a column called “Talk of the Town.” Its claim to fame was that it listed the phone numbers of whorehouses in Manila. Except that the first digit was deleted. (No sweat. Every schoolboy knew that it was 8.)
Our boss had canned the former columnist for some infraction and I was given the column to write. News traveled very quickly. Before my first write-up got into print, I was getting calls from madames from Pasay, Culi-Culi and San Andres.
My boss took the column away from me after a week. Pangs of conscience had hit him. He realized that he was abetting the corruption of a minor. I was sixteen. But he was too late. I had already been de-virginized.
Mercifully, I lost my job at The Confidential before any other virtues could be wasted. My classmates at Philets insisted that I deserved a more respectable calling. Besides, I was the religion editor of the Varsitarian, the official organ of UST.
So I told my boss I was quitting and he obliged by firing me. An announcement the following week in the paper, to the effect that I was no longer connected with the tabloid, set me off on the road to salvation. From then on, I became respectable. Freelanced with the Kislap-Graphic. Wrote some stuff for the Manila Times. Went into movies. And then, advertising.
It’s been a long time since those days of yellow journalism. Many things have changed. Lifestyles. Mores. Governments. Presidents. Even the Press has changed.
Now, there’s fecal journalism. Toilet journalism. Envelopmental journalism. And two types of yellow journalism. The one that exaggerates the virtues of the present administration. And the one that distorts its sins.
Aaaah, for those for young and innocent days!
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Email [email protected].
