Doro: the truth teller

Last week, I was interviewed for an audio-visual material to celebrate the 37th anniversary of Philippine Star. The topic was truth telling, a very appropriate one in this age of fake news. I was asked how truth telling relates to what I write as a columnist of this paper for some 30 years now.

That’s easy. Truth telling is all about putting context to news. So called objective news reporting, of the he said she said variety, does not help produce informed citizens in a democracy.

For example, Senator A says it is raining and Senator B says Senator A is wrong because the sun is shining, quoting both senators does not help inform readers or viewers on what is true. According to the esteemed Amando Doronila, my journalism professor and later editor at the defunct Manila Chronicle, the job of the real journalist is to go out there and see for himself what is the truth: is it raining or not.

Public officials and even some of the elite in the private sector bludgeon us with a call for objectivity when they are actually hiding something against the public interest. Or, they use PR practitioners who are experts in obfuscating issues, dishing out half-truths, which by definition is non-truth.

Exposing chicanery is the mission of the true journalist, the bedrock of our existence. And this is what Doronila drilled into our heads in our basic journalism courses at the then UP Institute of Mass Communication. When he was once again my professor in a graduate level course I took in journalism, he showed us exactly how this is done in the real world.

The term truth teller wasn’t yet coined at that time, but that was what Doro, as his colleagues fondly called him, was. Truth telling was his mission in life. I have not met a journalist who is as sharply analytical, not afraid to declare that a spade is nothing but a f*cking shovel. And because his integrity had always been impeccable, his truth telling had credibility.

Doro just passed away last week, a day after I was asked about truth telling. I was fortunate to receive a copy of his last book a few months ago, entitled simply: Doro: Behind the Byline. It is an engaging account of his life from the barrios of Dumangas, Iloilo to the halls of Congress and his exile in Australia and back in Manila after the People Power revolution. All of his 95 years on this earth were well lived.

Doro didn’t start out thinking he would be a journalist. His college degree was in Commerce. But after he became editor-in-chief of The Dawn, the student publication of the University of the East, the journalism bug had bitten him badly enough to apply for an entry level position in the Manila Daily Bulletin.

Doro recalled that Hernando Abaya, the city editor, hired him on the spot as a cub reporter with a salary of P150/month plus transportation allowance of P60/month. Then he was told they were increasing his salary to P170/month and no more probationary period. He didn’t have to cover the police and crime, but was assigned to assist a political reporter covering Congress.

Wrote Doro in his biography: “The internal dynamics of the congressional press gallery revealed more than any other the process of the political system, the symbiotic relationship between government and the press and, specifically between politicians and newspapermen… using each other, with different purposes concerning the free flow of information…

“This relationship has raised issues over the objectivity of journalists. The press has tried to deal with this by leaving it to the individual integrity of newspapermen to determine what information obtained in the course of this relationship would be withheld or disclosed in the interest of the public’s right to know.

“By dancing around this issue, the liberal press has not dispelled the criticism that the press in a democracy is much a part of the political establishment in an osmosis of political values shared by both the watchdogs of public opinion and the power holders being watched in order to keep their noses clean.”

Keeping one’s nose clean is the tough challenge for a journalist who thinks of his job as one in public trust. And Doro was surely able to navigate the treacherous waters of our country’s political environment a lot better than most.

It probably helped that Doro was not much of the back slapping type who hungers for attention. Doro was exceptionally low key as a journalist, focusing mostly on his job as he sees it to tell the truth no matter who gets hurt. I never saw him play poker in the press rooms of Congress or Malacanang, which is the daily ritual of the more senior journalists.

Doro was a voracious reader of history and world events. When I was assigned to cover foreign affairs by ABS-CBN at the same time that he was covering it for the then Daily Mirror, Doro enjoyed discussions with our news sources formulating our nation’s foreign policy. He was totally respected by colleagues and by the then Foreign Secretary Carlos P. Romulo.

Doro was one of the first newsmen arrested when martial law was declared. After he was released, he went into exile in Australia where he worked as a copy editor for the foreign news desk of the Melbourne Age.

“When we arrived in Melbourne on Saturday morning of June 2, 1975, it was not just a case of escaping the clutches of the Marcos dictatorship… marking the collapse of Philippine democracy. (We arrived) in the middle of winter, all bundled up like wartime refugees… It was a great relief that despite our hasty departure, I left no hostages behind as we brought all our three children with us…”

The epilogue of his biography showed how his heart ached for his country and its future.

“Will the nation who invented People Power ever have the will to exercise it? Will the undermining of press freedom, will Democracy itself, under threat here and elsewhere in the world even survive? I hold a very dim view of it.”

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco