Custom-Made “Journalists”
They also cover Customs events; some bring their own cameras so they can take photos of customs officials presenting the media with the smuggled goods they’ve discovered at the Port of Manila.
I remember attending one Customs coverage at the Manila Harbor Center in Vitas, Tondo. There were so many of them in the van provided by the Bureau’s media office for reporters that we reporters from the Manila broadsheets had to ask a TV crew for a ride and to sit in the back of their pick-up truck all the way back to Intramuros (the Walled City).
While regular reporters covering Customs do not usually mingle with them, there’s a tacit “live and let live” agreement between the two groups.
But there’s also a joke among reporters that one has to make one’s face familiar to customs officials because someone might pretend he’s you and, armed with your article, demand a “reward” from these officials.
So, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
“My personal definition of a pseudo-journalist is someone who has an obvious bias in his or her reporting,” said Biazon.
“When the ‘reporter’ obviously has the habit of unfairly attacking or unfairly defending (known among journalists as “AC-DC”) someone, and when his outfit obviously is not a news provider but as a means of propaganda—he or she is a fake journalist. That’s my personal definition,” he said.
A former ranking Bureau official said that some of these pseudo-journalists do practice “AC/DC”–or the practice of “attack, collect; defend, collect” among customs officials.
That would be a lucrative practice as the BOC is made up of different competing factions, each with its own agenda and political backer.
But the former BOC official also pointed out another possible explanation as to why there are so
many “reporters” covering Customs: because many of these “pseudo-journalists” also earn their keep by acting as brokers for importers.
“They’d come to me and ask for help about such and such a shipment but I would tell them that they have to deal with the customs collector,” the former official said.
“That is why I have doubts if this campaign of the new commissioner would succeed. They’re also brokers so they can go inside and transact with customs officials,” he added.
But Biazon maintains that he has the authority to keep out undesirable “pseudo-journalists” from the BOC compound.
“Everyone should remember that the Bureau of Customs is a government office… From what I heard, it seems our office at the BOC has been taken over by these pseudo-journalists,” he said.
“So, we just want to put things into order so that the employees of the Bureau of Customs can concentrate on their jobs and should not be harassed by character assassinations, etc,” he added.
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