By Diego Mora

In the newspaper business, there are hundreds of “hao siao,” a derogatory term that applies to people who pretend to be journalists without having professional training on how to write logically, report and pursue stories to their logical conclusion. These are the unscrupulous elements who don’t know the law of the press and the ethics that govern the conduct of reporters, deskmen and editors.

In the Philippine context, these are the gonzo reporters, who write about themselves and their clients, never about the context of the story from north, east, west and south, from whence the term “news” arose. These are the descendants of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and who wrote “30” by taking his own life. These are the “AC-DC” reporters and columnists, the Friday corps of collectors at Aduana and those who get allowances from the beats that they cover. Quite different from the “man in white” Tom Wolfe, whose “New Journalism” infected many, these gonzo reporters thought themselves to be the story and their personal narratives were interwoven with what they purported to be journalism.

There were many surprised looks at the Palace when Paulino Gutierrez was named executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Media Security (PTFoMS) by Malacanang on May 19, 2023 vice Joel Sy Egco, his cohort, a former president of the National Press Club of the Philippines (NPC) and a colleague in the presidential campaign of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. Egco and Gutierrez featured prominently when Cambridge Analytica was exposed as having assisted the Duterte campaign in mining data from Facebook surreptitiously for the purpose of influencing, or deluding Filipino voters, into choosing the bloviating Duterte as president. Egco moderated the botched press briefing on the “surrender” of Jonila Castro and Jed Tamano, both environmental activists, with the two activists repudiating the script prepared by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), an entity created by Duterte, and declaring they were coerced by their captors to “surrender.” The briefing exposed the charade and made the perpetrators of the bad show red in their faces like pigs with lipstick. Egco should stick to red-tagging and abandon all pretenses to being a journalist. He lost the calling when he became a chief red-tagger who also quarrelled with his colleagues over some PR project at DILG.

The final member of the gang tagged as “Three Stooges” by NPC veterans and members of the informal “Philippine Bar Association,” is Benny Antiporda, of Chinese descent and former dentistry student, who had a column for a notorious tabloid, where columnists had to pay their own salaries. As the paper’s publisher declared: “Binigyan ka na ng trabaho, naghahanap kla pa ng sweldo?” Antiporda became notorious for pushing the Boracay in Manila Bay project worth more than P300-million during the Duterte regime at a time when he was an undersecretary at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR.) Freelancing as a psychoanalyst, Antiporda claimed that the dolomite beach adjacent to the US Embassy would mitigate the worsening mental health problems of Metro Manilans. His theory flamed out and the white sand beach is as dark as black cow on a dark night.

Antiporda was shunted off to head the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) by the current regime but little time was wasted as he quarrelled with the agency’s lawyers, whom he threatened to oust for losing their cases and for disobeying orders. But one order NIA technicians followed hesitantly was for them to fix the airconditioners at Antiporda’s mansion. Accused before the Office of the Ombudsman for harassment and abuse of authority, the Ombudsman sided with the complainants, sacked Antiporda and barred him from serving in government again. Controversy hounds Antiporda, who also tried to get seized shipments from the custody of the now-defunct Economic Intelligence and Investigation Bureau (EIIB) during the Estrada administration. Antiporda was roundly criticized after accompanying a Chinese couple suspected of shabu smuggling to Binondo for interrogation and a scrumptious lunch. The couple evaporated. The Presidential Anti-Smuggling Group (PASG) was never the same again.

So, you have three ex-NPC presidents after the club’s glory days who flitted from one regime to another, making themselves busy doing nothing during the Estrada, Arroyo, Duterte and the current administrations. Gutierrez’s career at the PTFoMS is hanging by a thread as the People’s Journal axed the reporter-cum-columnist (whatever it is) after imprisoned Bureau of Customs (BOC) intelligence agent Jimmy Guban declared in a recent House hearing that it was Gutierrez who threatened him and his son with harm should he continue to tag Pulong Duterte and his brother-in-law Manases Carpio as the owners of a shabu shipment worth P6.8-billion stashed away in a magnetic filter in 2018.

The lame excuse of Gutierrez was that he only checked on the medical condition of Guban while he was under Senate detention. Gutierrez must have been some VIP to be allowed access to a person under custody. He was such a VIP during the Duterte administration that he could double as a physician to check on Guban’s vital signs. He later claimed that Guban was a notorious BOC intelligence agent. Takes one to know one. However, Palace officials are not pleased with his latest caper and some are seeking Gutierrez’s scalp. The People’s Journal Group, which is owned by the Romualdezes, just could not believe the Gutierrez excuse. After decades doing his bit as a PR operator, Gutierrez still could not create a believable narrative.

More than “cash, coke and champagne,” what unites these three bad examples is their rabid anti-communism. AlterMidya slammed Gutierrez for his ridiculous Jan. 4, 2024 piece on Frenchie Mae Cumpio, who had been detained in Tacloban, writing on his “Paul’s Alarm” column on JournalnewsOnline that “Nais din niyang (United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion Irene Khan) malaman ang sitwasyon ni Franchie (sic) Mae Cumpio, na kasalukuyang naka-detine sa Palo Provincial Jail sa Leyte dahil sa aktibo nitong papel sa lokal na teroristang grupo ng mga komunista.” Gutierrez was supposed to head the PTFoMS but here it was, he red-tagged Cumpio, who was the executive editor of Eastern Vista and a former editor of the University of the Philippines-Tacloban Vista student publication. She was also manager-in-training of the Radyo Taclobanon. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) also condemned Gutierrez for red-tagging Cumpio, who was accused of illegal possession of firearms and explosives, a no-bailable offense. “It also shows the absurdity of having a body created for media security in a government task force that actively puts journalists’ security at risk by accusing them of being enemies of the state,” NUJP argued. #

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Diego Mora is a retired journalist.

Opinions expressed in his contributed article above are his own and may not necessarily reflect Kodao’s.