Vergel O. Santos Archives | Page 5 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

Moment of truth

WHEN HE comes on Tuesday (May 22) Chief Justice Renato Corona will be appearing at his own impeachment trial for the first time. He did come on its opening day, on Jan. 16, but sat in the privilege boxes, looking more like one of the famous in the gallery...

Catch 22 (Updated)

TO BE sure, the challenge for Chief Justice Renato Corona to appear at his impeachment trial had been raised often enough before, in court as well as in the media and other outside forums. But it didn’t prove as provocative as when Senator-Judge Jinggoy Estrada did it on Monday...

The people won’t be fooled

AFTER A break of five weeks, the trial of Renato Corona resumes Monday (May 7), its momentum, you’d imagine, naturally diminished. In fact a poll in mid-break already showed it distantly low in the priority of popular concerns—in the minds of a mere 13 percent of the respondents. That...

Redemption

I ENTERED St. James Academy in June 1957 as a high-school freshman at the premature age of eleven, and immediately felt overextended, overmatched, absolutely out of my class. An extension of Maryknoll (now Miriam) College and run by the same order of American nuns, St. James spoke English, and...

Changing with change

Second and last part TO SWITCH media or not seems to have become a non-issue for newspapers. It has been decided by arrangements beyond their control: to not switch is to perish – in time. The debate has now beenultimately narrowed andconfined to when, not if, that time will come.

The fading print (updated)

AS IT does every year around this time the Philippine Press Institute, the national organization of newspapers, will meet in a general assembly from the 23rd to the 25th, this time to discuss what might seem a curious issue: “Media accountability and public engagement.”

Philosophy before law, idealism before justice

INDEED, BEFORE there ought to be a law, or any sense of justice, there ought to have been, first, philosophy and idealism, the essential standards. Alas, there’s only the law of libel, which, thus unprecedented, has actually got in the way of justice, working lopsidedly in favor of people...

Libel: Beyond decriminalization

WHEN I began as a newsman I was only 17, with scarcely a year of college and an immediate prospect yet of altogether dropping out, a prospect actually decided by my landing the job, which inspired in me the exciting, if naive, notion that, if college was intended to...

Renato and Miriam, a most awaited act

THIS TIME she did not go solo, as is her regular act; she had a quartet to back her up, piping choo-choo-wah and, even with just that, managing to contribute a worthy measure of dissonance to her grating, out-of-tune style.

Making up for chances lost forever (Updated)

THE MOMENT we gripped hands Roland Simbulan and I were brought back to the same occasion. There, many months earlier, with our better halves, namesakes as happens—his own Chit Estella and my own Chit Roces—we had sat at lunch in one kindred circle with other friends in the home of...