Cebu Journalism & Journalists

Five radio commentators (picked by CJJ for their broadcast experience, audience reach, and popularity) know who pays for the microphone.

When a radio opinion maker takes a stand on an issue, castigates an erring public official, or praises him to the heavens, he considers the payor, his “boss.”

Not the station manager or owner, although the radio commentator needs to obey station and broadcast rules, but the public.

Remember what Ronald Reagan, in a debate during the 1980 New Hampshire primary, said when the host ordered the soundman to cut off Reagan’s microphone? He shouted, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. (Breen)!”

It turned out that Reagan’s campaign did pick up the tab for the debate. And he claimed his right with honest vigor, which virtually won him the presidency. Continue Reading

To remember the sacrifice of Antonio Abad Tormis in the name of press freedom, a marker was installed at the site of his 1961 murder.

But in July 2010, his son Antonio Jr. told Cebu Citizens-Press Council (CCPC) assistant executive director Cherry Ann Lim that the marker had disappeared.

CCPC executive director Pachico Seares thereafter sent Lim and Sun.Star Cebu assistant news editor Gingging Campaña on a mission to gather information on the marker.

Campaña called the Cultural and Historical Commission of Cebu City Hall, but it had no record of a marker built for Tormis. Neither did the Zoning Division, which keeps all records pertaining to markers, nor the City Council secretariat records section.

What the City Council secretariat had was an ordinance and resolution, passed on July 13, 1966, naming the road from P. Del Rosario Ext. passing Aznar Coliseum to the TB Pavilion after Tormis. Continue Reading

This article originally appeared in a UP College of Communication magazine devoted to the awardee and circulated during the awards ceremony.

In the beginning was the printed word.

Growing up in Sibonga, some 50 kilometers south of Cebu City, Pachico A. Seares recalls being a wide reader. This preoccupation was not unusual in itself as the town was as sleepy as any in the 1950s, and the young man nicknamed Cheking was not only the son of Ramon Seares Sr. and Purificacion Alicaya, public school teachers, but also distinguished by a total lack of athletic prowess.

But as with all first loves, the passion for reading, which was to spawn Cheking’s enduring affair with writing, flourished at great cost. To reach the town’s two bookshelves, the diffident, gangly teenager had to enter the town hall, walk up flights of stairs and go down corridors, and run the gauntlet of officials and petitioners hanging around public offices. Continue Reading

(1916-1961)

A frame that hangs in the Tormis house in Cebu City summarizes Antonio Abad Tormis’ life as a journalist who died for his cause: “To remind a free people that the price of their freedom is the blood of martyrs.”

It is the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, given by the Department of Journalism of the Southern Illinois University after Antonio died from an assassin’s bullet on July 3, 1961.

His wife, Lux, 89, had constantly pleaded with her husband to take it easy on his campaign against corrupt government officials. She told him his exposés could cost him his life.   Continue Reading