Double jeers

Double jeers to BusinessMirror for: 1) missing a cue from its infamous columnist and thereby failing to report the biggest story of the day today (April 29) and 2) continuing to have a public official write a column which she uses to attack her critics, in violation of the press responsibility of acting as a check on government.

In her column today, controversial Ombudsman Ma. Merceditas Gutierrez wrote that a “win-win solution” to her problems (including her upcoming Senate impeachment trial) would be her resignation.

“It is supposedly the better of few options available to me today,” she wrote. “Because if I persist in fighting the charges leveled against me and I lose, I lose not only my retirement benefits, the opportunity to again serve government in equally dignified but less taxing capacities, but will also reap the shame of being the first Ombudsman to have been forcibly removed from office. But in the depths of my being, I see that as capitulation to false charges.” (“Darkness before the dawn“)

BusinessMirror editors should have picked up her planned resignation on the basis of Gutierrez’s column and reported it on the same day the column of the now-resigned Ombudsman came out. But there was no such report in any of the BusinessMirror’s pages today.

Of course, retaining Gutierrez as one of the paper’s columnists, thus allowing her to use the space that could otherwise have been used to hold government to account as her soap box against her critics is only one among many cases of the practice of “straddling” in the Philippine press, in which a government official who’s supposed to be the subject of press monitoring becomes his or her own monitor, and, of course, his or her own best advocate.

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