BEING AT odds with publishers/owners is an all-too-common predicament among editors, including presumptive ones like me, who strongly adhere to the dictum: “Publish first, truth always, be damned later.”
Owners have
their corporate interests to preserve, protect, and promote, which, in many
cases, are at variance with the editor’s fundamental duty to publish Truth, no
matter the cost.
No way is this
more articulated than in Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of
America’s Newspapers by James D. Squires, a former editor of the Chicago
Tribune, thus: “The marriage of corporations and journalism is an
unnatural, unhappy union. The best journalists are naturally
skeptical individuals with a healthy disrespect for authority, pomposity, and
ruling classes. They understand and appreciate the ideal of democracy that one
man’s vote and voice are as important as another’s. And they have a well-honed
apparatus for detecting two staples of the corporate culture – bullshit and
insincerity.”
You will know
who wears the pants in that unnatural, unhappy union with but a cursory browse
of the pages of a newspaper – the owner, when his photographs and news about
the most banal of his activities pepper the pages, Page One not excluded. Yes,
there are publishers who simply love to publish themselves, when even the least
of their business endeavors crowd legitimate news out of the pages, in effect
reducing their papers to nothing more than company journals.
In such set-up,
even the best editors can only do their worst. As the great Arthur Krock,
winner of three Pulitzer Prizes and once “Dean of Washington newsmen,” wrote:
“A hired journalism, however zealous, however loyal, however entrusted, however
brilliant, cannot be great because it speaks through the mist of
subordination.”
The editor
having the upper hand? When the publisher subordinates his interest to the
“sanctity of the desk.”
As in the early
days of journalism, newspapers are published to: 1) indulge the whims and
caprices of the publisher; 2) promote his businesses; and 3) serve the
political causes he espouses. Civic duty is a thoroughly alien entity to the
greater number of publishers.
To paraphrase
from memory what I read somewhere, the title of the material I cannot
immediately recall: If you told that kind of publisher that he had a duty to
the public to print the news objectively and accurately, he would have asked
what kind of duty some other kinds of businessmen had. His newspaper being a
business enterprise, news to him would be the same as cars to a Levy Laus, or
house and lot to a Nestor Mangio, or tocino and longanisa to
a Lolita Hizon, even halo-halo and pancit luglog to
a Razon.
News being no
more than a commodity to sell, a product to be packaged and presented in
whatever way that will be most appealing to his customers and thus will bring
him most profit. Even at the expense of integrity.
But commercial
viability and editorial integrity are not mutually exclusive.
This is best
exemplified in The New York Times, unarguably the number one
newspaper in the world.
A well-known
lore: At the time of World War II, faced with newsprint rationing, the Ochs and
Sulzberger families that owned the Times chose to print news
over advertising, thereby sacrificing much-needed revenues that the latter
offered. The act singularly established their paper’s moral ascendancy over all
other newspapers in America.
With the Times emerging
– and remaining to this day – the most influential newspaper in the USA, if not
in the whole world. That good decision of the owners proved to be good business
sense too. High-mindedness returned better profits in the long run, so the
moral lesson of the Times story instructs us.
Perhaps, Punto’s publishers
have read that same story. Hence, their express policy of editorial integrity
first, profitability second.
SO IT was
written here in October 2008 on the very first anniversary of this paper. So it
still stands strong today – Punto’s editorial integrity.
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