Corporate governance

HERE AGAIN is one of those exchanges I find myself drawn to with students researching for academic papers and theses. This time it’s about my take as a newspaper publisher on corporate governance—that is, as I have defined it in answer to one of the questions here, “doing business with a sense of public interest and, therefore, altruism, not just for profit.”

 

Q. What comes to mind when corporate governance is mentioned? Is it, for you, a trend, a way of doing things, merely big words, an illusion?

A. Ideally, it’s the first three; skeptically, it may well be the fourth—an entirely realistic prospect, given that it has been largely that (an illusion) all this time.

 

Is there an ideal way to report corporate governance (CG), and what? In other words, what does a “good” CG story contain? Is the objective better served by a news report or a business column?

It’s one of the issues the news media should continue dealing with—by both reporting and commenting on it. The reason is plain enough: If corporate governance (which I take to mean as doing business with a sense of public interest and, therefore, altruism, not just for profit) remains an illusion, social inequities and resentments will continue to grow and boil over into chaos.

 

How can you describe how your newspaper, and business pages in general, report on publicly listed companies?

At BusinessWorld, we always try to do our best by the above-mentioned thinking. In fact, it’s what we’re sworn by: a business and economic newspaper as a public trust.

 

Reports on the Pangilinan group, the Ayala group, and the Sy group appear to dominate reports on companies. Why do you think this is so?

For its greater potential for doing public good or harm (the latter more particularly), the bigger the company the closer it should be watched.

 

How do you decide which company reports to use? What are the factors that come into play when you decide which stories to run and how you ask/expect your reporters to write these stories? What would make you decide not to run a story?

Again, the decision turns on the consideration of public interest: How does a piece of business or economic news affect the public?

 

A good part of business stories originate from the companies themselves. Do you think that in a given story the reporter must consult other sources and not take the company-provided info at face value? Is this even practical? Or are there certain types of stories that require more effort than others?

For a story to be well informed and balanced, it should show all sides to or takes on it—apart from that of the company in question, those as well of the government (as regulator), of public and civic leaders (supposedly as people’s champions), and of independent experts.

 

How would you balance the need to report on bad practices versus the need to preserve market stability (i.e., not fuel speculation that may affect prices)?

It’s unimaginable how keeping a bad corporate practice from the market will do it any good—the public interest should be a newspaper’s first interest. As for a newspaper sacrificing credibility for financial profit: it’s not only compromised but also immoral journalism.

 

Have you ever killed/been prevailed upon to kill a story because it contained too much sensitive, or negative, information regarding a company? Has it happened that a story you ran had adverse consequences, i.e., pulled-out ads, a call to the publisher, etc? How was this resolved?

Prevailed upon to kill a story? No. Adverse consequences of reporting? Yes. Ad pullout? Yes. How resolved? In favor of publish-and-and-be-dammed.

 

How can the gaps in corporate governance reporting, or business reporting in general, best be filled?

By making everyone understand—the news media, their subjects (corporations and corporate executives), the public or market—that the revelation of the truth in the public interest is what democracy and the open market are all about, themselves constituting the ultimate stake.