Columnists, Partisans and Conflicts of Interest
Insistent nevertheless
Some columnists nevertheless continued to write on Aquino’s mental health, despite the “psychiatric report” debacle.
Star columnist Carmen Pedrosa wrote on April 24 that Aquino had sought psychiatric help in the United States. She cited but did not identify a source whom she claimed had nothing to gain from lying.
Her source, she said, claimed that the late Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. had sought professional help for his son while the Aquino family was in Boston. Pedrosa went on to enumerate Aquino III’s allegedly weird acts while he was a student at the Ateneo, and ended her column by challenging the presidential candidates to take a psychiatric exam.
Like the Inquirer’s Belinda Olivares-Cunanan who also wrote on Aquino’s alleged mental problems, Pedrosa had been pro- Arroyo administration and also had ties with former president Arroyo (see sidebar: Sidebar: When is a columnist too partisan?).
On Apr. 29, Pedrosa and a group called Citizens for the Right to Information claimed that a certain Dr. Steve Agular had served as Aquino’s psychiatrist. But ABS-CBNNEWS.com on April 30 quoted Aquino as denying he had sought psychiatric help, saying Agular was a family friend, whose wife, a dentist, he had consulted.
Two days earlier, on April 27, Guido Delgado, former National Power Corp. president and an admitted NP volunteer, had circulated copies of yet another psychiatric report on Aquino III. Delgado said the document was unverified and that it was up to the media to verify if its contents were true or not.
Among the media reports at this time were a story on the Ateneo de Manila University’s denial of having prepared the second report, another on the denial by Fr. Jaime Bulatao, the alleged signatory of the second, that he had signed it, and still another on the NP and LP’s reactions.
Some columnists had written on Aquino’s mental health as early as late 2009. In a Nov. 10 column in the Daily Tribune, Estrada partisan Ernesto Maceda claimed that autism had suddenly become a hot topic, because, he said, of “indications that a major national candidate is autistic,” in the process provoking protests that being autistic did not make those so afflicted retarded or stupid. The Manila Standard Today reported two days later that Aquino almost “blew his top” when asked if Maceda was referring to him in his column. The paper did not explain why it had identified Aquino as the candidate Maceda meant.
[…] Columnists, Partisans, and Conflicts of Interest by Luis V. Teodoro with research by Rupert Francis Mangilit and John Reiner Antiquerra […]
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