Sidebar | When is a columnist too partisan?

She had been supportive of the Arroyo administration, and, during the campaign, supported the administration party’s candidate, Gilbert Teodoro. Her husband Thelmo was one of Arroyo’s midnight appointees, having been named chair of the Social Security System on Mar. 5.

When Monsod was writing extensively about the C5 road controversy, along with Business Mirror columnist Butch del Castillo, Cunanan was writing about Aquino III’s supposedly benefitting from the Subic Clark Tarlac Expressway (SCTEX). SCTEX had to traverse the Cojuangcos’ Hacienda Luisita in order to be completed. Before the start of the official campaign, Del Castillo was also one of the first columnists to question Aquino’s mental and emotional health.

Like Cunanan, the Philippine Star’s Carmen Pedrosa also claimed in her column that reports on Aquino’s mental state were true. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo appointed Pedrosa chair of the Cultural Center of the Philippines on March 29. Pedrosa had earlier written articles supporting Arroyo’s campaign to amend the Constitution.

Former senator and Daily Tribune columnist Ernesto Maceda can lay claim to starting the rumors about Aquino III’s mental and emotional health, by insinuating in a March 2010 column that Aquino III was autistic. Maceda was Joseph Estrada’s campaign manager in the 2010 elections.

Such affinities and glaring conflicts of interest pale compared to the relationship between husband and wife and the responsibilities of column writing. Vice Presidential candidate Manuel Roxas II’s wife Korina Sanchez is on a one-year leave from ABS-CBN. But she continued to write her column for the Star, unashamedly using the advantage her Star space gave her to not so subtly campaign for her husband. Widespread public knowledge that she’s the wife of Roxas, however, at least forewarned readers of her column’s bias.

Not so with some columnists. While there’s a world of a difference between making false claims and being on the side of truth, the bottom line issue about partisanship, in the sense of a passionate belief in one’s candidate, is that it must be free of such entanglements as being part of the candidate’s campaign, whether as a volunteer or as a paid member of his staff.

– Luis V. Teodoro with research by Rupert Francis D. Mangilit and John Reiner M. Antiquerra