They should all have their heads examined!

I am trying to recall when in our history politicians stooped this low during a presidential campaign. It was pretty bad when re-electionist President Ferdinand Marcos was challenged by Sen. Sergio Osmeña Jr., the father of Sen. Serge Osmeña III and Cebu Mayor Tommy Osmeña. I covered that campaign and it was very colorful. But I don’t think it was as bad as this one or maybe I have just forgotten.

That fake Noynoy psychiatric report will have to be a new low in our history of dirty politics. While I agree with Maria Ressa that ABS-CBN had the obligation to make it public, I don’t think they handled it as responsibly as they claim. I read Maria’s long explanation of the context of their report. I missed the breakout of the report on TV Patrol but I saw the exact segment on You Tube, courtesy of someone who was reacting to Ces Drilon’s Facebook update.

I have come to the conclusion that ABS-CBN allowed itself to be used by whoever is their source in the NP to accomplish his dastardly goal. Why? Maybe the folks at the newsroom desperately wanted to prove they are not part of Noynoy’s campaign team as is widely rumored. Or maybe they are just hungry for a scoop and were eager to please a source just so they can have more in the future. Or maybe it was just a bad call on a busy news day.

I think ABS-CBN’s handling of the news item is flawed. According to Maria, among the e-mails they received on it before they aired the report came from a multilateral financial institution. “When I scrolled down, it had been forwarded numerous times, already spreading virally on email.” That must have made them worried about losing a scoop.

Because their own investigation already reveals it was a fake, the headline of their story should have been “Fake report on Noynoy’s mental health circulating” or “NP sources circulating fake report on Noy’s mental health”. Instead it was “Did Noynoy suffer from clinical depression?” which sounds like “Did you beat your wife?”

Of course the question mark made it more tabloid appealing for their viewers but it is not the ethical choice. The news item should have also more strongly emphasized that Fr. Tito Caluag, the person who supposedly signed the report already disowned it as a fake.

The report shouldn’t have gone into the salacious details of the spurious document as they did. That’s like showing a video of a child being abused while supposedly exposing the misdeed. A brief sentence or two to give an idea of the contents would have sufficed. But the ABS-CBN report went on and on about the libelous and false details (with text support pa) which enabled the black ops person to accomplish what he intended. The long narration of the fabricated details served to create doubts in the minds of people about Noynoy, regardless of the rather weak caveat in the ABS-CBN report that it is a fake.

Stranger still, the ABS-CBN report only showed Fr. Caluag saying mass. He was not interviewed. A good sound bite from Fr. Caluag could have supported the fake angle more strongly. It couldn’t have been that difficult for them to catch Fr. Caluag because he is almost always at ABS-CBN where he is practically the chaplain.

Maria said they didn’t rush with the story so I take that to mean they had a few days to develop it. It wouldn’t take a couple of days to get an interview from Fr. Caluag who, as the supposed signatory, is the only person who can declare the document a fake.

Even if I think this was not one of ABS-CBN’s brightest moments, I am impressed with the way Maria is bringing the ABS-CBN News organization into developed world status very quickly. But it is not without its own perils.

Now equipped with laptops and smart phones, reporters have a never ending deadline every second, every minute on several platforms including social networks. That puts a lot of demands on reporters and they have to be the very best to withstand deadlines every minute without sacrificing the accuracy demands of good journalism.

There is this timely article last Saturday in the New York Times entitled “The Danger of Always Being On” precisely on the need for journalists not to lose their professional skepticism and good judgment as they use more and more of these so called new media. Specially in an election season, everyone is using everyone and old media should proudly display an old fashioned ability to sniff garbage and declare them as such.

But I can empathize with the folks in the newsrooms. Indeed there is an acceleration of the news cycle, as the NYT article pointed out. “We’re always on, which increases the danger that things will not get checked as they should,” Bill Keller, a Times executive editor commented.

Keller said news organizations have always had times when they have had to work quickly on deadline, and they know there is more danger of mistakes on those occasions. “The difference now is the deadline is always.”

Consider what happened to Hiroko Tabuchi as she covered the Toyota investigation. “With less than three hours of sleep, Tabuchi wrote, she had to get up at 6 a.m. ‘We love you Mr. Toyoda!’ After the news conference, she wrote that Toyoda took few questions and ‘ignored reporters, incl me who tried to ask a follow-up. I’m sorry, but Toyota sucks.’

Her editor said it is normal for reporters to complain to one another, about irritations at work, sometimes vividly. But when they do it “to the world, live, I think it’s unacceptable.” The editor said he would have pulled Tabuchi from the Toyota story, but he decided not to because what she wrote indicated she was upset with the company’s press arrangements, not prejudiced against it or its products. He said he saw no bias in her reporting and had received no complaints about it.

Tabuchi was quoted in the NYT article expressing her mixed feelings on Twitter: “The banter on Twitter is often very casual and forces us to economize on words. That can be perilous. But the last thing I’d want is collegial banter and humor to affect perceptions of our coverage,” she explained.

Indeed, Twitter or other social media for that matter, can lull a reporter “into opening up far too much.” The Times has written guidelines for social media. As Philip Corbett, the standards editor, put it, they boil down to a warning that Times staffers on Facebook and Twitter “can’t think of it as a personal activity. Like it or not, they are seen as a representative of The New York Times.”

The Times article warned: “using the new tools without old-fashioned reporting can get you in trouble. The technology may be new, the speed faster, the culture different, but in journalism, the old rules still apply: be skeptical, check it out.”

On the Noynoy story, ABS-CBN did check it out and they did declare it a hoax but they allowed their findings to take second fiddle to the fake and libelous claim in their presentation at TV Patrol. They could have presented it in a way that didn’t allow the NP black propagandist a chance to get his sordid objective accomplished. Maybe ABS-CBN should reveal its source. Because the source fed it a fake report, with the intention of fooling the network and the public, the ethical obligation to protect him is extinguished.

For now, I agree that we should have the heads of our politicians examined… preferably with a lie detector machine attached to their bodies. These people are trying to make fools out of all of us and we shouldn’t allow them to get away with it.

If this black propaganda approach to power continues, I expect to reach a point when I won’t care who wins anymore because they are all nuts. I may just end up voting for Nick Perlas not only because he is the only one offering real change but because I do not want to be a party to six more years of mayhem.

Tax day

It’s that time of the year again when government takes until it hurts. Jose Villaescusa sent me this thought.

They said we should all pay our taxes with a smile. Well, I tried that but they still wanted cash!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. This and some past columns can also be viewed at www.boochanco.com