‘And the rest of this f#cking country…’

Most great stories of infamy are usually about something wild and big and chaotic such as a political assassination or mass murder or setting a village on fire. It could also be about sex, as with the Biblical stories of infamy such as Adam eating the forbidden fruit or a young woman committing fornication in her fa-ther’s house.

But it was never about the weather; that is until one veteran newspaper editor decided to write about the weather one ordinary night decades ago in the newsroom of a Manila daily. This tale would become one of Philippine journalism’s greatest infamies.

Newsmen of decades past know this story well, it’s been told and retold after all, usually over bottles of beer or one’s favorite pulutan. Generations and gen-erations of younger journalists also learned about it like an urban legend, a story passed on by every aging and gruff editor – partly as a stern warning to the younger ones of how not to do it and partly as an example of the art of “truth-telling.”

This is what happened decades ago, so goes the story; I hope I remember it correctly.

Mr. Veteran Editor was part of the team that was putting the next day’s paper to bed. On the front page’s upper ear was where the weather report would be placed for the next day’s issue, as it was every single day.

This veteran editor knows newspapering like the back of his hand and just as he did every night, he was editing stories, including the weather forecast sub-mitted by the weather bureau.

But something different happened that night – either this editor was so bored that time or was having a really bad day. That, or Loki, the most notorious trick-ster god, must have cast a spell on him, at least at that moment.

You see, he added one word to the weather report and inadvertently made history. I don’t remember the exact sentence but to illustrate, it’s something like this:

“Scattered rainshowers will prevail over Southern Luzon and the rest of this f#cking country will have clear skies.”

As I said and not surprisingly, that story would become one of journalism’s greatest infamies.

Don’t ask me what happened to the editor or how he paid for that one night of mischief, but I know for sure that it was a true story because I heard it straight from his boss, no less than the newspaper’s editor-in-chief at the time.

When Mr. Editor-in-Chief narrated this story to me years after that fateful night, he said it was the morning after when the whole thing unraveled, as shocked and bewildered readers started calling the newspaper’s office to report the “mistake.”

It’s a newspaper EIC’s worst nightmare but the boss himself was already laughing about it when he told me the story years later, although he was shaking and scratching his head in between laughs, perhaps still in disbelief after all those years.

Truth-tellers

I think about this story now as I think about our role as truth-tellers, of how we should keep readers informed because it is a crucial part of democracy.

But truth-telling isn’t always easy. This profession after all is filled with nuances. There are people – our sources – who lie like spies; there are manipulative tycoons in Hermes ties; there are spin doctors who only want half truths to come out and whistle-blowers who know the whole truth but are afraid to speak out.

And then there are the stories we can’t always write immediately because it could cause a business to collapse or could put people’s lives at risk.

As The Philippine STAR celebrates its 37th year tomorrow, July 28, it has chosen to shine the light on truth-telling, which is especially timely in this age of fake news.

Today as it was before, we are guided by love and hope that someday this country will be the great nation we all dream it would be and the path to that is the constant search for truth. Sometimes we make mistakes, but believe me when I say we try every single day in the newsroom to find the truth and we put it out there with our name on it.

But sometimes, admittedly, the hard truths get under our skin and it hits us hard. Writing news, however, or even something as mundane as the weather, has to be objective and balanced, to the extent that objectivity exists. There is no room for emotions.

When I was a rookie journalist fresh out of UP, writing for a different newspaper then, I was asked to do a report about some UP student activists who died in a military encounter in a southern province.

This was how I started my first sentence: “The fascist military…” Of course, that line never saw print. My shocked editors didn’t know whether to laugh or cry but they called for a quick meeting to discuss my future.

Indeed, there are things we can’t always say even if, to us, it’s the truth.

How many times, for instance, have we found ourselves sighing heavily in frustration because things don’t always work in this country and we’re always in between setbacks and upheavals and elections and the yearly State of the Nation Address.

So yes, as that infamous editor once wrote, sometimes this nation of 114 million really feels like a hell of a f#cking country. Now, isn’t that the truth?

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.