SOLID EXAMPLE OF ANTI-CORONA BRAINWASHING1

Here’s a good example of how detractors of Chief Justice Renato Corona are DESPERATELY trying to brainwash us through media.

And of how media can conveniently forget fair or balanced reporting whenever it wants to. JUDGE FOR YOURSELVES, ladies and gentlemen. Read everything first before you do.

The front-page headline of today’s Inquirer is about questionable details of a $21.9-million loan granted by the World Bank to the Supreme Court.

Take note, people:

The World Bank approved the loan in 2003 to assist the borrower in developing a more effective and accessible judiciary, a brainchild of then Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr.

Reynato Puno succeeded Davide as Chief Justice until Renato Corona assumed office in 2010 or some SEVEN YEARS after the loan was granted.

But take note, people, the Inquirer DID NOT ask Davide or Puno for comment, even if the loan was ALREADY IN USE long before Corona became Chief Justice.

Neither did Inquirer say anything to show that the term of Davide and Puno was 100 percent clean so the two need not be asked to comment.

The Inquirer report admitted that loan result indicators depict achievements in several areas.

But it DID NOT CITE the achievements. However, it came out with COMPLETE  DETAILS on supposedly questionable transactions using the loan.

The Inquirer said according to the World Bank, since Corona assumed his post in mid-2010 progress in reforming the judiciary has been rated unsatisfactory, and that there have been, among others, “inaccurate/incomplete information” on financial management reports and “diminished existing internal check-and-balance mechanism.”

But Inquirer did not cite who was/were in-charge of everything cited by the World Bank. Inquirer DID NOT GET the side of any other officer of the Supreme Court.

Not even Justice Midas Marquez, the Supreme Court spokesman and administrator who was obviously referred to in some supposedly questionable aspects of the story even if he was not directly named.

Inquirer cited what the World Bank report described as ineligible” purchases like the printing supply of the Court Reporter’s Case Index, purchase of laptop computers, speaker’s fee for seminars, registration fee of JUSTICES (take note people, plural, not just one justice) attending international conferences and foreign travels of JUSTICES  and their staff.

But Inquirer did not cite who were the other justices, or who were the ones who made and approved the requests.  Neither did the newspaper indicate any effort it had done to find out the personalities concerned.

I’m a former senior editor of the Journal Group of Publications, a nationally-circulated newspaper, ladies and gentlemen. 

Unless it has been changed, one rule every newspaperman, or every media man is bound to follow, is to get the SIDE of everyone involved and all the missing details of a story FIRST before you come out with it in print.

But Inquirer got a brief comment from Corona only yesterday, a Saturday and with offices closed, after the last novena for him at the Supreme Court grounds.

And last but definitely not THE LEAST, along with the story, THREE FULL-PAGE ADVERTISEMENTS worth almost P1 million appeared today in Inquirer.

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