Custom-Made “Journalists”
“There are small publications whose copies you can count on your fingers, and yet they have 15 correspondents in the Bureau. We have to address that,” he said.
Added another Customs official: “Some of (these tabloids) have five reporters while others have a one-man army. The reporter, publisher, columnist is just one person. The only one who’s different is the legal adviser.”
But besides these tabloids and the national media, another group of “reporters” also “cover” the Bureau every week.
“There are groups who make an exodus all the way from Pampanga, Bulacan, and even as far away as Bicol. They come here every Friday to ask officials for money,” a BOC official said.
“Maybe that’s why they said that up to 400 reporters cover the BOC. These groups from the provinces, they come in groups of five or seven and visit the offices to ask for money for medicine, for transportation fare, what have you,” the official said.
“We know about them only from the complaints we get from our officials. And that’s part of the problem. If only they would not give these groups (money), these people from the provinces would not come here again and again,” the official added.
The official complained that while the BOC media office has accredited only 41 reporters, these groups can still freely come and go at Customs.
While in covering Customs for the Philippine Daily Inquirer I have yet to encounter those who make the “exodus” to the BOC from the provinces, it is hard to avoid those “reporters” allegedly covering the beat for the weekly tabloids.
Press conferences at the bureau are usually held in the President’s Room at the fourth floor of the Port of Manila building in the BOC compound.
The room is much bigger than the media briefing room in Malacañang Palace, but it is usually full during press the conferences of Customs officials.
Whatever one might say about them, however, the “pseudo reporters” do make it a point to ask pertinent questions and are direct to the point, unlike their counterpart hao siaos who frequent the regular media forums and kapihan (press conferences over coffee) held in Metro Manila’s hotels.
[…] Custom-made “Journalists” by Philip C. Tubeza […]