The one minute delay that may have cost a life
The camera started rolling at 5:20 am.
ABS CBN cameraman Angel Valderama and his assistant Marlon Sayson took footage in Makati City of a shootout in the early morning of August 2. A certain Marlon Inducil, said to be a member of the so-called Ivan Padilla carjacking group, was being taken out of a police vehicle. When Valderama and Sayson approached Inducil for an interview, a policeman ushered them to the back of the police vehicle. There the news crew saw a man, wounded in the head, slumped on the vehicle’s backseat.
It was P/Supt. Maristelo Manalo, chief of National Capital Region Police Office’s Anti-Carnapping (sic) unit, who led the news team to the back of the NCRPO vehicle. For yet another “exclusive” in the primetime newscast, the cameramen took footage of the man.
Manalo told Valderama and Sayson that the man was Ivan Padilla, 23, the leader of the group to which Inducil allegedly belonged. The group was recently in the news after allegedly masterminding carjacking incidents that had prominent figures and their kin (among them Former Foreign Affairs Sec. Alberto Romulo and the mother of actor Derek Ramsey) for victims.
“Ikaw ba si Ivan? (Are you Ivan?)” Sayson asked. Padilla looked too weak to refuse an interview; he could only mumble his name. Sayson followed up, asking “Itong nakaraan, saan ka nagtatago? (Where have you been hiding these past days?)” Padilla did not—or could not—reply.
Manalo was then heard in the background, saying “Dalhin na sa ospital yan (Bring him to the hospital now).” All this was in footage that the cameramen would later say “took less than a minute.”
The delay
Valderama and Sayson later admitted that they did not follow Padilla to the hospital anymore. After the cameramen were through, it took the police more time to bring Padilla to the hospital. Newscasts would later report the Commission on Human Rights’ observation about the length of time it took the police to take him to the hospital.
The Ospital ng Makati log had it that he arrived at 5:55 in the morning. Rock Ed Philippines Founder and Executive Director Gang Badoy, in her article on the incident, said Padilla’s family could not figure out what took the police so long to take Padilla from where he had been captured village to Ospital ng Makati in Bel Air, normally a mere 15-minute trip.
Police guidelines on armed confrontations (as stated in Rule 10 of the Police Operations and Procedures manual) state that as soon as the site of a shootout is cleared, the wounded should be taken to the nearest hospital.
Later, the morning news advisories reported that Padilla had already died. He was declared dead five minutes upon arrival at the hospital, at 6:00 am. A Makati Public Safety Assistance member interviewed over 24 Oras on Aug. 2 said Padilla’s body was already purplish when he arrived.
Reports would later reveal that the shootout actually happened at around 4:45 am, about 35 minutes before ABS-CBN started taking the footage. After the ABS-CBN news crew took the footage, it took another 20 minutes before Padilla was admitted to the hospital.
Who’s at fault?
While police authorities were being slammed for the delay, Manalo, when interviewed by 24 Oras on Aug. 5, pointed his finger at the media, particularly the ABS-CBN news crew, as the cause of the delay. He said: “Dadalhin na sa ospital kaya lang may nagpumilit pa rin [na mag-interbyu]…may reporter na tanungin siya…. Nakikita niyo naman, sinasarado na yung ano [pinto at may nagsasabi nang], dalhin na sa ospital yan. ([We] were about to bring him to the hospital, but a reporter still tried to [get an interview]. A reporter asked him. As you can see, we were already closing [the vehicle’s door and we’re already saying], bring him to the hospital now.)”
The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, through its deputy director Luis V. Teodoro, was quoted in the same report as saying that “Kung na-delay nga ang pagdala sa ospital kay G. Padilla dahil nag-interbyu ang media, e merong kakulangan ang media. (If indeed the media caused the delay in Mr. Padilla’s being brought to the hospital, the media would be at fault.)”
In its late night newscast Bandila, ABS-CBN reviewed the footage and interviewed Valderama and Sayson. In their interview with Ces Drilon, the cameramen said they should not be blamed for the delay. It was Manalo, they said, who led them to the vehicle where the wounded Padilla was. They also said the footage was not too long, in any case. Valderama said, “Kung ano ang nakita ninyo sa video, yun lang yung interview namin sa kanya. Hindi kami nagputol ng . (What you saw in the video was the whole interview we had with him [Padilla]. We did not edit [the video].)”
The next day, ABS-CBN released a statement on its coverage on Padilla’s arrest. The station claimed that when Valderama was taking the footage, “there was yet no attempt to bring Padilla to a hospital.” “Thus,” ABS-CBN added, “our cameraman clearly did not stop, prevent, or hinder any effort to rush him to a hospital.”
It was not disclosed, however, whether the police informed the news crew that Padilla had been arrested after a shootout during which he was wounded, or if the crew even bothered to ask. But the footage itself did show that Padilla needed immediate medical attention.
ABS-CBN and the broadcast media in general are not new to getting “exclusive” footage of this kind. TV cameras have caught worse incidents on tape. On Nov. 7, 2005, A UNTV video caught the police firing at an open vehicle where three suspected members of the Valle Verde carjacking group, already lifeless, were lying. In February 2009, the ABS-CBN news team itself was witness to the “NIA Road Shootout”, in which a plain-clothes policeman dragged one of the suspected carjackers, who was already wounded, out of a vehicle, threw him on the ground, and then shot him (See: CHR steps into Ivan Padilla shootout case, on GMANews.tv).
However, unlike in the above cases, Padilla was still alive when the ABS-CBN crew saw him. That the police should have brought Padilla to the hospital, and that the crew did not take too long in taking the footage, are both beside the point. If the danger to anyone’s life is evident, ensuring his or her safety should take precedence over getting the story.
The Poynter Institute points out that the media’s subjects must be treated as human beings and not merely entities to attain journalistic ends. In an article on media ethics, Poynter Institute’s Ethics Program Director Bob Steele said, “Journalists have a moral obligation to render assistance in a case where someone’s life is…in profound jeopardy, and no one other than the journalist can help.” While the police officials were there, bound by standard procedures to seek medical assistance for the wounded, there still lies the obligation to assist in cases where assistance may be needed. In Padilla’s case, the media could have demanded that he be taken to the hospital instead of focusing their cameras on him and asking him questions as precious seconds passed.
Bad reporting
It wasn’t just the media’s behavior that came under questioning. There were also their inaccuracies. The first 24 Oras and TV Patrol reports said both Padilla’s parents were in prison, but only his mother is currently in jail (at the women’s correctional facility in Mandaluyong). His father, the family explained, was acquitted of criminal charges in 2007.
The same 24 Oras report said Padilla had five brothers. The sister, in an email interview with CMFR, said she had only two siblings, and Ivan was the only male. The sister also that lamented the airing of a photo of Padilla’s son, as well as photos of Padilla with some of his friends, which tended to suggest that those friends were involved in carjacking.
Then there was the display of Padilla’s bloody image all over the television, with an attempt to get more of the grisly image. On ABS-CBN, some news reports on Padilla’s arrest and death would carry his bloodied image from the “exclusive” video. And as if that was not enough, TV Patrol on Apr. 3 and 4, showed Padilla’s body in the morgue, an image that has become only too common in local primetime news.
If ABS-CBN managed to take a video of Padilla’s body, RPN-9 and TV5 did not, but insisted in taking one nonetheless. The manager of the funeral parlor where Ivan’s body was taken repeatedly denied these stations permission to take footage of Padilla’s body upon the family’s request. But another sister of Padilla said she overheard an RPN-9 crewmember arguing that “Nasa kulungan naman parehong magulang niyan. Wala namang magtatanong o magagalit (Both his parents are in jail. No one would ask or get angry, anyway).”
And there was the lack of regard for grief as a private affair. Padilla’s sister said that despite their requesting the media not to cover his wake and funeral, some media people refused to leave the funeral parlor. She said: “[T]he media went to everywhere the body went. They were even outside Heritage Park almost the whole day of the cremation.”
She added another concern about the media coverage: “We [the family] requested the media to ‘please don’t film us’ very nicely. We [she and her sister] are students so we cannot just show ourselves on TV without permission.” She said the family made the same request to the hospital: “[We] were not aware that they were filming (at the hospital). They said that they weren’t, so although the cameras were pointed at us, we believed them when they said that they were not filming or recording.” But the newscasts showed footage of them at the hospital anyway.
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