I Think, Threfore I Write Column: to My Fellow Capiceño Journalists

From column I THINK, THEREFORE I WRITE

BY MARK LEX G. BARRIOS

To Concerned Fellow Capiceño Journalists

We, journalists, are egoists, so says National Artist and former Manila editor F. Sionil Jose.

      If, indeed, we are – and we are, I believe – among all egoists, we should be the least affected. Frequently, though, we become the most, for while it is our task to detach ourselves from our subject, the desire to evoke reform entails us otherwise. Hence, many of us today assume the role of the active advocate more than of the traditional, passive watchdog.

What is wrong with this, you may ask.

None, that is, unless you put on the mantle of the advocative journalist as cloak for your own subservient brands of journalism.

So much of impartiality, independence and integrity claims when, every month or even every day perhaps, you receive paycheck for commissioned self-serving advertorials or get an exchange deal for keeping mum on government shenanigans, ruses and tomfooleries. In so doing, you have become, instead of being the voice of the underprivileged, the stinking mouthpiece of the powers-that-be.

You contrive polls that even heaven knows nothing of. You conceive of politically well-defacing news from spurious sources. Gung ho as you are, you blaze all these abroad to effect trends – trends that, after the May 10 elections, generated a generous return of your unethical, more so diabolically immoral, investments.

You are egoists. For quite some time, your heads have ballooned bigger than your bodies, but with bankrollers around, along with your pockets, your heads did more so.

You are egoists but in hawking yourself, you have sold out the only good faculty of our being egoists, our pride of retaining dignity and self-esteem to our person.

oOo

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