Reporting the Veloso Case: Biased, sensationalized, tasteless

By Luis V. Teodoro

THE MANILA broadsheets as well as broadcast media covered the case of Mary Jane Veloso from the time it became news in the third week of January. They intensified the coverage as the date of her scheduled execution by firing squad on April 29 approached. The three broadsheets with the most circulation — The Philippine Star, the Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Daily Inquirer — uniformly bannered developments in her case on the 29th itself.

“Screaming for Mercy” was the Philippine Star’s banner headline for a story that emphasized the possibility of a last minute reprieve. The Manila Bulletin’s was “No Delay in Execution,” but the Inquirer’s was a forthright and erroneous “Death Came Before Dawn.” The Inquirer issued a front page statement on April 30 (“Deep Regrets, But Happy, Grateful”) in which it expressed its regrets for “the aggravation” it caused the Veloso family.

April 29, 2015 front pages of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Manila Bulletin and The Philippine Star.

Apparently, the Inquirer took the risk of its being mistaken on the belief that Mary Jane Veloso was likely to have been executed hours after its April 29th issue would hit the streets. If Mary Jane Veloso was indeed executed as scheduled, it would have scooped its competitors. It must have seemed like a reasonable risk to take. Several appeals to the Indonesian government had after all been denied, and the Widodo government seemed to be sending the world the message that her execution would go on as scheduled regardless of any appeal from the Philippine government, the United Nations, or Amnesty International. (The UN had appealed for clemency, while AI had once again argued that the death penalty does not deter crime.) Accompanying its April 29th banner story was, in fact, a report that (President) “Aquino ‘last chance appeal, strategy” had failed to save Mary Jane Veloso. That story as well as the banner story on Veloso’s alleged execution have since been taken down from the Inquirer’s online site.

The Inquirer’s acknowledging its error was by itself laudable, but fell short of explaining why the mistake happened. Although its readers would have been more enlightened had the Inquirer explained the circumstances that drove it to, in effect, speculate in the news, it could hardly have done that, because it would have exposed it to charges that it erred on the side of sensationalism rather than factual, accurate reporting. One could also ask why it was not corrected in subsequent editions of the paper.

But after “killing” Mary Jane Veloso in its headline and story of April 29, and its less than perfect “apology” of the 30th, the Inquirer followed up the fiasco with “A miracle happened” on the front page of its April 30 issue. In the same issue, another story quoted the Indonesian Attorney General as declaring that Mary Jane Veloso’s reprieve was “due to P-Noy plea.” Not satisfied with that, the fourth line of the same headline opined that “credit grabbing (was) in full swing,” in another swipe at those groups and individuals most media organizations habitually refer to as “militants.”

The same (non Muslim) “militants” were once again the targets, directly this time, of a post-labor day (May 2) story headlined “Militants use Velosos in labor protest rallies.”

By accepting on face value the statement of the Indonesian Attorney General, the Inquirer ignored the role of non-governmental groups (NGOs) such as the Filipino migrants group Migrante International and its networks, as well as the Velosos’ private lawyers. It forgot that, for the sake of courtesy and its relations with the Philippines, the Indonesian government could hardly have said anything else except to attribute its last minute reprieve of Veloso to President Benigno Aquino III.

To give credit where credit is due, the Philippine government did petition the Indonesia government for clemency as well as a review of her case. But the reprieve of Mary Jane Veloso was based on the argument that she was a victim of human trafficking and could testify on the illegal activities of her alleged recruiter.

That headline was therefore no more than an opinion based on acceptance of the statement without the skepticism that necessarily should inform journalists whenever such statements, especially from governments, are made. But even more obviously is the last headline re “militants” supposedly using the Velosos also an opinion. Nowhere in the report itself is anything said about “the militants” using the Velosos; instead the report basically belongs in the category of the conventional “he said, she said” story. Disregarding the fact that the Velosos have for five years been frustrated at every turn in their attempts to even get information on the situation of Mary Jane from the Department of Foreign Affairs, that headline also implied that the Velosos don’t know any better, and are easily manipulated.

Much worse is the Inquirer’s dignifying the tasteless hashtag “#Firing squad for Celia Veloso” by doing a story on how social media was reacting to Celia Veloso’s criticism of government (Celia Veloso is the mother of Mary Jane) which used that hashtag as the headline. The report emphasized the mostly negative reactions of Netizens in Facebook and Twitter without providing the context of Celia Veloso’s rant against the government, which earned her the label “ingrate,” among others, over social media.

News reports are supposed to provide information rather than opinion. But in addition to its inaccurate report of April 29, the Inquirer has been publishing both biased “reports” as well as outright opinion on its front pages for years, despite its having in its employ a so-called readers’ advocate.

That practice has been particularly damaging to Philippine journalism. As the supposedly most influential broadsheet in the country, its spinning reports to favor its own views of events is being held up not only in journalism schools (which should know better) as well as in many newsrooms across the archipelago (which don’t). By practically erasing the line between information and opinion, the Inquirer has made it even more difficult for its readers to tell the difference, and thus subtracts daily from, rather than adds to, the people’s understanding of their society.

The public as well as journalism schools should reserve their soundest criticism of the Philippine media for those organizations that retard mass understanding of Philippine society by feeding through false, misleading, distorted information the vast ignorance that already afflicts it. But even more should the public be aware of the practice of providing opinion rather than fact as one of the reasons why, despite the deluge of “information” from both the old and the new media, many Filipinos are still woefully uninformed and ill-equipped to make those decisions on public issues free citizens are mandated to make in a democracy.