Inquirer apologizes

JEERS TO the Philippine Daily Inquirer for publishing photos of Corona defense witness Demetrio Vicente on its March 14 front page that was unflattering at least and malicious at most. Vicente had taken the stand to disprove allegations that Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona had failed to disclose his acquisition of a 1,700 square-meter Marikina property in his statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN).

If the point was to humiliate and ridicule Vicente, not only the publication of the photographs succeeded in doing so. The caption also read “’CHARACTER’ (in quotes) WITNESS The many faces of Demetrio Vicente on the witness stand. He’s no ordinary witness after all. He’s the cousin of the Chief Justice whose wife sold him seven parcels of land in 1990, where he now grows bonsai.”

People on social networking sites found the Inquirer photos “insensitive”, “crass”, “tasteless”, and “mean,” among others. Vicente, who had suffered a stroke, had difficulty speaking during yesterday’s Senate trial.

The Inquirer, through its Twitter account, did take note of the comments, but chose to defend its decision. It said the “point was we didn’t find it funny nor was it our intention to make fun.” It added, somewhat disingenuously, that: “Those were the only photos available.”

Regardless of the editors’ intent in publishing the photos, it was still in violation of the ethical mandate of humaneness, which in practice means  “Treat(ing) sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect, not merely as means to journalistic ends.” (The CMFR Ethics Manual: A Values Approach to News Media Ethics)

It was also in violation of the Inquirer’s own Stylebook: A Manual of Style and Usage for Editors, Writers, Reporters and Students, which requires editors to ask themselves when deciding what photos to publish what readers “are likely to add or read into their interpretation of the photo’s content,” and whether “the positive reasons for publishing the photos outweigh the almost certain negative reaction they will elicit from a sizeable portion of the readership.”

CMFR earlier said that an apology to both Vicente and Inquirer readers, as some netizens have suggested, is definitely in order. Inquirer did apologize online, which was good. But an apology on its front page would be even better—preferably with the acknowledgment that it violated both the universally accepted ethical principle of humaneness as well as its own Manual of Style and Usage.

On March 15, Inquirer published a front-page apology:

“The Inquirer apologizes to its readers who took offense at the newspaper’s use of a series of photographs of a  defense witness, Demetrio Vicente, who testified on Tuesday in the Senate impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona.”

Publishing the unflattering Vicente photos was malicious at most

http://storify.com/cmfr/inquirer-front-page-photo