Vergel O. Santos Archives | Page 4 of 6

We will not surrender our freedoms

Today, Independence Day, we renew our pledge to serve the people, to continue speaking truth to power, and to guard and defend freedom of the press and of expression from all threats.

Covering the Pandemic

Covering the CoViD-19 Pandemic

The challenge of transition

BUSINESSWORLD MARKS its 25th year today with its founder, Raul L. Locsin, hovering about in his ghostly constitution. I definitely sense it and feel deservingly visited; after all, I consented to step into this pair of extra-large publisher’s shoes he had left and have worn them into this moment...

Benjamin Defensor, atypical editor, 82

BENJIE DEFENSOR was not the stereotypical editor of his time, a character caricatured with only moderate exaggeration as cantankerous, oppressive, and unpleasable, who regards his subordinates as his absolute inferiors and knows only one way to make them serve him better—torture. Benjie is actually nice, and I have an idea...

Misquoted? Bring your own tape recorder

MORE AND more news subjects have been complaining, to me at least, about being misquoted, and some of them say that not infrequently the news media don’t allow a word in from them and, if at all they do, they make sure the final word is theirs—that is, the...

The game of patronage

I HAVE often found myself at forums faced with the question, How do we even begin to live as a people of common interests and shared responsibilities, a people predisposed to give and take, instead of taking advantage of, let alone exploiting, one another? And, dominated as they often are by...

Maguindanao: A continuing perversion of justice

ESMAIL ENOG has gone missing for three months now. Indeed, he is thought dead even if no final word has come or body has turned up to confirm that. It’s been simply too long for anyone who finds himself in the circumstances he did to have been gone and...

Unchilled and unchastened

IF THE Supreme Court has taken the tragedy befalling its chief as only a proper signal for it to shape up, it doesn't at all show. There seems in fact a continuous closing of ranks, club-fashion, against the exact same principle on which he was impeached, convicted, and fired...

Writing: Where to begin?

"WHY ARE you sitting down to write?" asked Dr. Rudolf Flesch. "Because, sir," replied E. B. White, "it is more comfortable than standing up." A perfectly practical answer, although not to the point of Dr. Flesch’s question (there is, however, a side lesson that ought not to be missed here—clarity). The...

Writing is communication

Writing, according to Matthew (Arnold, that is), is having something to say and saying it as clearly as you can. From that, you can gather three only-too-logical presumptions: first, that all writing is not only communication but storytelling; second, that, therefore, its function is communication; and, third, that its...

A walking smoke bomb

ANY NEWS subject who likes to hide simply cannot abide Raissa Robles: she’s a walking smoke bomb. And she has never been so challenged, she herself admits, as during the impeachment trial of the chief justice, Renato Corona. In fact, even now that Corona already has been judged guilty and...

Misplaced sympathy

NO MATTER if brought upon oneself, misery is bound to attract sympathy. It all seems a natural arrangement, one that tends even to affirm such innate goodness of man as man likes to believe. But carried to such lengths as giving misery the company it precisely courts, and proverbially...