LuisTeodoro.com

IT’S NOT rocket science, and neither is it brain surgery: the country has a new President, and the press must re-examine its assumptions when it covers government. The ex-President it loved to hate is busy reinventing herself. She’s no longer in Malacanang, and with her have gone some of the most offensive public officials this country has had to pay out of public funds. The relationship based on suspicion, mistrust, and outright hostility between the press and the government ceased to exist last July 1. A new one will be, and should be, taking its place.

Will the task of getting information be hard for the press, or will it be easy? Will government officials be so transparent as to develop through the press the public awareness of what government’s doing every democracy needs? How its relationship with the press will develop and what that relationship will be like will largely depend on the Aquino III government and its officials.

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WHEN Barack Obama was elected US President in 2008, hopes ran high that change was forthcoming both in the United States itself as well as abroad.

Obama would decisively address the economic crisis at home, reduce the unemployment rate by creating the conditions that would generate jobs, and put an end to the federal budget deficit.

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THE speed with which the Philippine National Police has identified, and filed murder charges against, the suspects in the killing of an Ilocos Norte journalist was unprecedented.

Police investigations into extrajudicial killings and the killing of journalists, if they take place at all, usually move with the speed of flowing molasses. This time the investigation, identification of the suspects, and the filing of charges took place in one week in what must be the police equivalent of lightning speed. It is also unusual for local officials to be so quickly charged , the alleged principal being the vice mayor-elect of Bacarra, Ilocos Norte. But that he has not yet taken office and established the usual networks with the police and the military could have helped hasten the process.

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THE ADVICE, totally unsolicited, for Benigno Aquino III to be “consultative” and to be the President of “everyone including his enemies” sounded odd indeed from a Malacanang bureaucrat who was no doubt speaking on the instructions of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Being everyone’s President, after all, is the last thing Mrs. Arroyo, has been.

But Elena Bautista Horn, the current chief of Arroyo’s Presidential Management Staff, presumed to lecture Aquino on what being President of the country should be like, in belated reaction to Aquino’s saying that he would not retain Gen. Delfin Bangit as AFP Chief of Staff.

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ANY JOURNALIST in this country with some experience, and who has had to look for documentary sources from government when writing a news report, analysis or commentary, knows one thing: secrecy is not one of the bureaucracy’s strong suits.

It is possible, though not always easy, to get copies of the documents one needs, such as the Statements of Assets and Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) of government officials. In addition, there’s always someone in a government office eager to show how much he or she is in the know by providing reporters “inside information.” Of course journalists have to be wary of attempts to mislead them, thus the need, demanded by best practice anyway, to consult other sources for confirmation.

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IT’S BECOME nearly standard practice for NGOs and other groups to heap praises on the Filipino electorate in the aftermath of every election.

The puffery was especially pronounced after May 10, and consisted of two types: one praised the voters and the Commission on Elections for walking them through the first automated elections in the country’s history. The other praised the voters but not the Comelec, which some groups had been saying since about a year ago was neither adequately prepared nor preparing for the exercise.

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HARRY, THE new US Ambassador to the Philippines, and the first African American to hold that post in this country, is surnamed Thomas, as in USS Thomas, the US Army transport ship that arrived in Manila on August 21, 1901, about a month after it sailed from San Francisco. The ship was carrying some 500 teachers from the United States — the first batch of about a thousand tasked with teaching “natives” the English language and establishing the beginnings of the public school system.

As everyone should know who has gone through that system, or even the private one that co-exists with it, from the ship’s name came the American teachers’ label as “Thomasites” and not from that of St. Thomas Aquinas. After all, the US policy of encouraging in its newly acquired (through conquest and at the cost of about a million “native” lives) colony the use of the English language and the creation of a public school system was meant, among others, to undermine the obscurantist system of which the University of Santo Tomas was such a sterling representative. In that system, learning was by rote and infused with Church dogma, the Spanish clergy, despite its antipathy to the “natives,” being the teachers. Thus did Rizal’s Noli me Tangere devote one chapter (The Class in Physics) to exposing how racist, stupid, and anti-learning the system was.

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