Vinia Datinguinoo Mukherjee: Congratulations, PCIJ! Mabuhay kayo!
Lead Philippines: But without credible mass media there, what is left to protect the people..?
vonjobi: it's juned sOniDo.
Lead Philippines: Can't believe this is still happening in the country. If the government does nothing, I won't be...
Keith Bacongco: who could we forget Alecks here in Mindanao... aside from PCIJ trainings, he also helped us a lot...

Latest Message 3 days, 16 hours ago

hopeless_race : Sana itreat naman po ng media ang hacienda luisita at mendiola massacre na parang MAGUINADANAO MASSACRE. Ipublicized ang mga katotohanan at ipakita sa tao ang karumaldumal na pinaggagawa sa mga farmers dun. Untouchable po ba sila cory at danding at hindi magawang batikusin ng media about these two massacres?
hopeless_race : Kapag napaguusapan ang mendiola at hacienda luisita massacre ay parang walang nangyari at parang hindi big deal. Anu po ba ang pinagkaiba ng dalawang nabanggit na massacre sa maguindanao massacre?
hopeless_race : Its sad that we pinoys are blind to the fact of what had happened in mendiola and hacienda luisita. Ang tanong..bakit ang media ay hindi manlang matackle ang ganitong usapin? Takot ba sila kay cory at danding?
hopeless_race : Wilkins" brand, for P1.4 billion.-1999 Sugarland Multi-Food Corp. for P2.9 billion 2001- Purefoods Corp P7 billion P60 billion Coca-Cola ... See More 2002- Cosmos Bottling Corp. from RFM Corp. for P14.1 billion October 2008- GSIS' shares in Meralco worth PHP30 Billion. December 2008- country's biggest oil refiner, Petron Corporation. international company shopping spree: Australian boutique brewer J. Boag and Son for A$96 million in 2000. $97 million for Thai Amarit Brewery Ltd $35.5 mi
hopeless_race : Gud am..glad to be back.
jr_lad : rip mr. alecks pabico. you'll be greatly missed!
sevens21 : Dati input mo lng name at SSS ID makukuha mo agad STATIC INFO...
sevens21 : tawag ka sa HOTLINE nila walang ANSWER grrr we need pa namn ng static info SSS Gising!!!
sevens21 : Gawa naman po kayo ng article about SSS. Pangit ng site nila dali ma blocked ng account
guest_899 : we must check the background of each potential candidates to avoid having another big mistake like GMA
guest_899 : congratulations to PCIJ, more power and God Bless !
jazzymuver : how did Arroyo swallow that kind of things!! how come that she just spend the money our countrymen for her own sake!!
guest_3664 : i would be glad if u can include the investigation of the manner public officials announce infra projects as per COA regulation. It is frustrating to see their faces on the tarpaulin instead of the prescribed information like name of project, date of implementation,amount of contract, source/s of fund, among other things. This is very rampant here in Marikina. Thanks and more power on your noble endeavors. We need people like you to have make our country great again.
jhanz_08 : im making research on R.A 9136...with rgards to the privatization of NPC..could someone out there can let me understand more bout this matter?why was monopoly dismantled?email me..jhanycem@yahoo.com...thanks much
erika marie : P.S.:) my paper is due next week and i do hope someone could provide me these reports coming from reliable resources thank you ulit.
erika marie : P.S.
guest_4275 : i am currently doing a study regarding political killings in the philippines. could someone out there please send me human rights reports under Aquino and Ramos administration. you could send it at my email: erikamariet@yahoo.com your response would surely be very much appreciated. thank you everyone. god bless.
guest_4275 : i am currently doing a study for my paper regarding political killings in the philippines. i noted that there are no human rights reports during the Aquino and Ramos administration. could someone out there please send me reports regarding these matter? i do hope these reports came from reliable resources you could send it in my email; erikamariet@yahoo.comyour response would surely be appreciated. thanks everyone. god bless.
jayson bourne : gusto ko po maging member ng PCIJ, panu po ba? may application po ba? sana mapadalhan nyo ako ng info sa email ko... www.jboxpenshoppe@yahoo.com
jayson bourne : cory is OK, but kris & Noynoy sensationalize masyado...
guest_9891 : LABAN pa rin!
meow : boycotts worked during marcos years. how about doing it now against the businesses of the con-ass congressmen?
meow : aside from 168, what other establishments can we boycott that belong to the arroyos and their cronies?
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Cory and our inscrutable politics

Posted by: Malou C. Mangahas | August 3, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Filed under: General

FOR FIVE years and through seven botched coups mounted against her government, I covered President Cory as a reporter for The Manila Times and The Manila Chronicle.

We were all young then, impetuous, stubborn, irrepressible, and we did not always agree with Cory and her Cabinet. To be honest, there were moments we did not like her all that much. And the feeling, though fleeting, was somewhat mutual.

Field a testy question, and she was sure to show her repulsion. In quick succession, she’d serve you a pout (her mouth twitched, not puckered), knit her brows, swing her head to the left, then right, then left again, and finally a curt missive, “Next question, please.”

I was then president of the Malacañang Press Corps, the batch that came to be called “Brat Pack,” which in 1987 staged a protest action against Cory and her restrictive guards. We all came garbed in black or with black armbands. For hours, we sat slumped on the curbside of Malacañang Palace. It was to be the only protest action to be staged by reporters inside Malacañang.

For three days, with our editors’ support, we did not to write a single story about Cory. We ignored her and all her events at the Palace. All we wanted was reasonable access to information and to official sources as we believed befitted the return of press freedom after the EDSA People Power revolt.

We called her “Presidentita,” and the Palace guards commanded by then Col. Voltaire Gazmin, her attack dogs. Not that they actually assaulted us with cannons and rifles, but there were many episodes of pushing and shoving and verbal tussles between the guards and the Palace press. They wanted to secure Cory’s space; we wanted our stories from Cory’s office.

One time the guards pushed too much that Malaya reporter Joel C. Paredes actually challenged Cory’s guards to a fistfight. Brave, burly, but pudgy, Joel, a former college fratman, suddenly dropped notebook and pen, rolled his fists into balls, spread his legs a la Pacquiao on the ring with Hatton, and summoned Cory’s guards to a jabfest.

We got Joel out of the scene, rescuing him from certain death. After he had chilled, we realized the inequity of it all: our notebooks and pens vs the weapons cache of Cory’s guards, not to mention of the Armed Forces, which she led as commander in chief!

Perhaps the pushing and shoving came with the territory because we wanted to cover Cory so diligently. That, or we inflicted the power of the pen too much on Cory and her officials.

The Cory government had to contend with a media most pervasive, most menacing, and most unruly. From sunrise to dusk — on occasion up to midnight or dawn because coups and calamities visited her government in a series — we covered Cory like crazy, obsessively, compulsively. In large measure, that was because we were too zealous of our restored freedoms; we did not want to yield ground, or leave any policies unexplained by Cory and her officials

Most working days, the reporters among us would typically thrust tape recorders, the photographers Nikon and Canon with massive lens, and the television crew big, heavy videocams, onto the mouth, nose, ear, nape, and face of whoever emerged from a visit or meeting with the Presidentita. Most of the time, by our own doing, we went home with bumps or lumps, or abscess from the cameras and recorders we carried.

When Cory went to church or held closed-door meetings with anyone, we hounded her, too. Our network of sources then was, in reporter’s lingo, as deep as an oil well. It had to be because Cory presided over a government that launched too many firsts, enacted too many controversial policies. She also had to deal with too many threats to the security of the republic, and too many Marcos-era politicians vanquished or reinventing themselves, and who now mocked the good sense and the sanity of our people.

We resorted to the “ambush” interview — that intrusive, you might say uncouth, behavior of reporters toward sources. We did so to get our stories between the long, boring wait by the curbside of the Malacañang Premiere Guest House, a two-story building where Cory held office.

Perhaps the modesty of the official residence Cory had chosen was the real problem. There was no room at the Guest House for about 40 reporters from as many media agencies assigned to cover Cory every single day.

In time, in part because of our protest action, the Presidentita’s staff built the media a gazebo by the garden across the Guest House, and we finally had roof on our heads when it rained while we waited for news.

By 1989, as new press secretary, journalist Teodoro C. Benigno had the Malacañang Palace renovated to make room for a Press Briefing Room and workstations for the Press Corps members.

Back then, the Malacañang Beat was a hardship post. Reporters wrote from five to 12 stories a day, each with a unique event or policy peg. It was important to read up on issues and documents, to know not simply who or what but also why and how, to understand not just concepts but also stats, to be both literate and numerate.

The Cory years launched a whole new regime of good programs that by quality and quantity surpass the combined achievements of her three successors. The three post-EDSA presidents after Cory — Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph E. Estrada, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo — practically just had to breeze through the presidency all because Cory had done most of the work for them. And yet, by all accounts, they built less and destroyed more of what Cory had set out to do for the nation. And yes, they probably did more bad than all the good and not-so-good things that Cory did.

Apart from a new Constitution, Cory gave the nation groundbreaking policies and reforms, notably the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the Commission on Human Rights, the Local Government Code, the Family Code, the Administrative Code, the Expanded Value-Added Tax, the Generics Act, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, the National Youth Commission, and a bounty of laws for mothers, children, rebel-returnees, and indigenous communities.

As well, Cory freed political prisoners, forged peace with rebels, and nursed to life the communities struck down by the biggest disasters in recent Philippine history (the 1990 earthquake and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in1991).

In Cory’s time, politics was less about spin, embellished stats, brownie points and executive privilege; politics was more about people and public service.

In Cory’s time, reporters may field the toughest questions to the highest officials and were sure to get honest — if not absolutely complete — answers. To be sure, Cory did not have all the answers to all the questions that we asked then, and still ask today, as a people.

Yet the best cut is this: When Cory was president, decency defined the conduct of reporters toward politicians, and politicians toward reporters. Integrity was the standard against which reporters assessed politicians.

Cory was sometimes a difficult source. But she certainly was always a good source. She was good as she was honest. In our trained reporter’s eye, we saw she did not know how to lie, or was totally uncomfortable holding back information. Cory would rather be caught frowning or scowling on cam than tell reporters tall tales. Indeed, the lesson of Cory Aquino as leader and president should not be lost on Filipino politicians.

Powerlessness — acting and doing like one is without power — is the secret of Cory’s power over the masses. Most others in the practice of politics today keep a contrary faith that was defined 60 years ago by Jose Avelino, Senate president under the government of Elpidio Quirino.

“What are we in power for?” asked Avelino, when he was investigated in 1949 for tax evasion and eventually sentenced to one-year suspension. Quirino later resurrected him as ambassador at large.

Avelino went down — really down the pits — of Philippine history for a devastatingly great quote on the inscrutable and incorrigible ways of Filipino politicians.

With absolute antipathy toward his investigators, he remarked: “Why should we pretend to be saints when in reality we are not? We are not angels, we are not saints. When we die, we will all go to hell. It is better to be in hell because in that place there are no investigations.”

Cory thrashed Avelino’s hypothesis of the “smarter” politician. In life as in death, she commanded the boundless affection and respect of the people that is probably the only kind of real, smart power that should matter.

The Filipino people have demonstrated time and again that they get it so well: they don’t like politicians who demonstrate genius only in the practice of the seven deadly sins — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride or vainglory.

In truth, the less Cory propped herself, the more she grew in the people’s love and respect. As president, Cory took her oath of office before the Constitution, but defined her politics by the canons of her faith, the heavenly virtues of charity, diligence, patience, kindness, temperance, and humility.

If politics were a test of sainthood, we can count by the fingers of one hand the Filipino politicians who would make the grade. In my book, as a journalist who had covered Cory then and now, even with sometimes testy results, Cory would be in top running. - PCIJ, August 2009

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