Corruption among columnists

I heard on the radio yesterday that Vic Agustin’s column in the Inquirer has been suspended, albeit for a day. It was also reported that the paper is looking into reports it had received that Agustin was doing PR work for some people, which supposedly explains why he was at that press conference where he doused water on activist RC Constantino.

Now, a lot of columnists do PR work. This is mainly because of the nature of their medium: they opinionate and their columns are not usually subjected to the same rigorous standards (fact-checking, balance, fairness, “objectivity,” etc.) that news reports have to go through. In this country, about the only qualification for one to become an opinion columnist is the ability to regurgitate views and, in many instances, crap. (Readable crap, but crap just the same.)

Which explains why PR agents and those who have vested interests and agenda to pursue almost always go to columnists firsts (though I have to say here, as we who spoke Visayan would say, puwera sa maayo). You think corruption among reporters is bad? Corruption among columnists is even worse!

In fact, it is so bad that, in many instances, the PR guys themselves have become columnists. And there are columnists who sit on the board of profitable government corporations. Compared to the hao-siaos who knock on the hotel doors of politicians to ask for fare money, that is a pretty neat racket, don’t you think?

And I’m not just talking about some two-bit, fly-by-night tabloids here. You can find these people in the largest papers.

So what was a business columnist (or, more accurately, a business gossip columnist) like Vic Agustin doing at a political event like a presscon by House leaders? Is he doing PR work for some interest groups? I don’t know that for a fact, although I am convinced that, given the juicy stuff he puts in his rather enjoyable column, people feed him all sorts of information all the time and, in that sense, use him. But he certainly was in good company at the press conference — in the company of columnists who have been pretty vociferous in pushing for Cha-cha and who use their space in their newspapers for that purpose. Vociferous enough for you to wonder why they’re doing it.

Two of them, Carmen Navarro-Pedrosa (the Philippine Star website does not have an archive so this link is to the column of Marichu Villanueva, who talked about that water-dousing incident) and Belinda Oliveras-Cunanan, berated Constantino for disrupting the conference.

I would have wanted them to stand up as well to berate Jose de Venecia for disrupting the nation. But that’s asking for too much because Cunanan, for one, seems to like de Venecia very much. Like you, I can only wonder why.