What makes the NPC fail

insidetheclub

What makes the NPC fail

By Teodoro Valencia

Simply stated, the emphasis on “rights” and the disregard for duties and responsibilities of the members of the National Press Club has been the main cause of the failure of the club to achieve its goals. The second big cause of failure has been the sublimation of the good of the club to political ambitions of the few. A third big reason has been the failure of club officials to realize that the primary objective of the club is to provide them a meeting place instead of a political arena.

I was among the doubters who refused to join the National Press Club after an unpleasant experience in 1953 when the annual election of officers held at the Malacanang Park turned out to be a politician’s nightmare instead of a healthy get-together of brethren in the profession. I thought this attitude would die the moment we could put up a press building. We were wrong. After a brief respite, the apathy and indifference of club members to what’s good for them, came back.

Since 1955, the National Press Club has done great things for its members. We have settled so many in permanent homes in the various government housing projects. The press has since become a cohesive force for good, speaking with one voice in times of national crisis. We have had successful attempts to gain international recognition as an active force in the press of the free world. But, sad to say, the club itself has degenerated. It is no longer the gathering place of the press. The building stands as a symbol of unity but it has failed to generate the fellowship that it was meant to promote.

The tragedy is that every member of the Press Club is aware of his Rights. He complains loudly about bad meals, about prices and about the lack of facilities in his club. Yet, nobody has ever thought of the need for supporting the club adequately. The P1-a-month fee is entirely out of the line with present needs of the club and yet every attempt to raise funds was met with strong opposition. We want a first-class club on a tenth-rate fee. We want something for nothing. Nobody ever got that. We won’t either.

The result of these is that the administrations of the club have depended entirely on the personality of whoever was President of the club. IN other words, group action never ruled the Press Club. A careless President meant a careless carefree administration. A fighting President meant a good administration. The members could not care less. They left everything to the President and felt that their only duty was to gripe.

I have almost stopped going to the National Press Club. It saddens me to have to say this but it hurt me every time I witnessed members taking the club as if it were a business establishment that they patronize and from which they could expect the best for the least amount of money. The personal hygiene of the members left much to be desired and this was obvious from the cigarette butts all over the place, the filth that could only have come from the lack of cooperation from the general patronage.

It is strange that the library, for instance, is the very same library that it was when we put up for the first time. Many good books are no longer in the shelves because some members have taken them home for their personal libraries. On had a right to expect that the library would receive personal donations from the members instead of being pirated of valuable editions. We once tried the honor system in the library but it turned out that even with the usual library registry rules, we were to lose our books.

The National Press Club is saddled with debts incurred by members who signed chits without regard to their ability to pay. The SWA (Social Welfare Administration) had nothing on the NPC. For many, the Press Club was for exploitation. Their answer to requests for payment was to stop going to the Press Club and to denounce it for arrogance or for unreasonableness on members.

The quality of the membership deserves one paragraph. Every self-proclaimed newspaperman feels that he has a “right” to membership and the officers of the club felt that some persons “have to be” taken in. It has never occurred to anyone that bad eggs should be eliminated from the membership and barred from entering the club in order to make the club a pleasant place for the rest of the newspapermen. We have had so many sad experiences with drunks and deadbeats that one would think we have learned a lesson but the truth is that we have not.

It has come to a point where members of the club don’t dare take their friends to the club because of the possibility that they would be accosted for a “touch” or perhaps engaged in a debate on subjects that have little or no interest for the guest. There was a time when foreign correspondents felt it a “must” to visit the National Press Club. Now, it is safer to show them the building and then detour them to more pleasant places for taking meals or snacks.

The National press Club was never meant to be anything but a club. It is not, and should not be molded into a headquarters for labor activities or politics. People are supposed to go to the club for relaxation from their daily toils – to sit with friends and contemplate the passing events in comparative ease, devoid of the tensions of a newspaper assignment. We have never learned to relax in the club. We have always tried to make it a battleground for ideas instead of tired heads and aching muscles.

There are many good newspapermen with executive abilities who could make the club work but they shy away from the National Press Club because they know that they would have to work alone and against odds if they want anything done at all. Unless we remove the “gimme” attitude of the members of the club and inspired in them, instead, a desire to do their part, we shall always have the building but no National Press Club.

One of the best examples of how we have ruined our own club is the way we butt into other people’s business. Almost no one is safe in giving a party in the NPC without the danger of being invaded by uninvited gusts or “kibitzers”. We have been thrown the rule book in our insane belief that since the NPC is “ours”, we can do in it what we please. In the process, we have ruined it even for our purposes.

It is incredible that the only time we get the newspapermen to go to the NPC is during election day. And most of the members go only to vote. Throughout the year, we have a handful of people who park around the club because they’ve been used to the idea or they have nowhere else to go. During special occasions, such as Gridiron Night or some special press conference, many who attend don’t want to pay their share of the expenses because they feel they have “rights”.

Unless we learned that we can’t have a real club unless we pitched in and did our share of responsibility, we shall never have one that we can be proud of. It is pointless for anyone to devote his entire energies to making a good club if that someone finds himself alone and derided for the effort.

In retrospect, I think we made a mistake in putting up this edifice called the National Press Club. We should have put up a more modest one that we could have improved as the years went by. The brutal truth is that we made the mistake of putting up a National Press Club building before we had a National Press Club in fact. We tried to build a club around a building and failed in the process. We’re still trying but the building is the handicap. Most of us feel that we “own” a share in the glory and the advantages but not in the work necessary to keep the club going.

We might save the day for the Philippine press if we elect dedicated men who will run for office in the club for what they can do for it and not for the glory that they will heap upon themselves by winning an election. The trouble today is that so many become candidates in the hope that with victory they shall be an inch taller. We need tall men who shall guide the membership, work with vigor and selflessness, not ambitious men who will inflict themselves on the club and to hell with what happens to it.

Perhaps it is time to dissociate glory from club officership. We need a permanent board of management who shall be chosen on merit and not by popularity vote. This, we must divorce from the elective board of the club who shall decide policies of the press as a professional body and help managers of the club re-make the National Press Club into a real social residence of the members. This is how they do it in the National Press Club in Washington and in other places they have successfully run press clubs.

We don’t stand to move ahead with our present ways of doing things. A politics-ridden club can only head for the scrap heap, let us forget personal glory and ambition and get together in putting up a press club that we can be proud of. We have the building. We have the land. What we don’t have is the will to make the most of our gifts of the civic community and of the government. We were given a toy but we are not playing with it. We are tearing it apart, piece by piece. There is still time to save it. If we cast aside pride, we can do it. It is later than we think.


Lifted from: The National Press Club of the Philippines 50 Golden Years

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Militancy in the time of repression



insidetheclub

Militancy in the time of repression

by Satur Ocampo

Over the five decades of existence of the National Press Club, militancy in the Philippine press has had many manifestations. The inspiring examples of the militant journalism by Marcelo H. del Pilar, or "Plaridel" (after whom the NPC Plaridel Hall as named), and other members of the Propaganda Movement of the 1980s have kept such militancy alive, in varying degrees and extents, through all the years.

 A distinct type of militancy, involving not just the Philippine press but the NPC specifically, is what I wish to dwell on this short piece. It's militancy of the revolutionary genre, with the interesting story of its own. It tells how the NPC leadership, and the NPC itself, became part of the then fast-growing national democratic movement. It also tells how such involvement radically transformed the worldview, lifestyle and career of the first two-term NPC president-the veritable "Batang Klub," our dear departed colleague and my comrade-in-arms, Antonio M. Zumel.

It was a time of political ferment amidst economic difficulties for the Filipino people. Ferdinand E. Marcos had just started to serve the second term as President of the Philippines, having been proclaimed winner in an election term attended by widespread vote-buying, cheating, and violence. His state-of-the-nation address on January 29, 1970 attracted a huge protest demonstration in front of Congress, largely of students and workers demanding fundamental reforms.

After the militant youth demonstrations had thrown a cardboard casket symbolizing the death of democracy at Marcos, the US-trained anti-riot police brutally dispersed the demonstrators, hurting and maiming many of them.

That bloody dispersal spurred another huge protest march to the Malacanang Palace gates the following day. The march turned into a confrontation with the Malacanang security group and then into a pitch battle between the demonstrators and the Metropolitan Police Command-later reinforced by Army troops under the Task Force Lawin from Central Luzon.

The historic event became known as the Battle of Mendiola. It signaled the beginning of the First Quarter Storm (FQS) of 1970, characterized by a series of big protest marches and demonstrations in Metro manila until March, often with violent clashes between demonstrators and armed police.

The FQS spurred the flowering of the national Democratic (ND) mass organizations, led by the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK), across the country that carried on unprecedented militant protest actions.

My wife, Carolina "Bobbie" S. Malay, and myself were then working with the Manila Times and Taliba. We were both in the NPC board of directors, she as a treasurer and me as a vice president. With Tony Zumel and a number of NPC press statements of ND activist organizations, and open the NPC as a place for meetings and a sanctuary for political activists being pursued by the police in dispersal operations.

We also sought to unify into a progressive federation the unionized workers in the four main newspapers: the Manila Times, Manila Bulletin, Manila Chronicle and the Philippines Herald. In fact, we were set to establish the federation in appropriate ceremonies at the Plaridel Hall on September 23, 1972. The declaration of martial law aborted the event. That project was later pursued and realized in the later half of the 1980s by militant journalists and unionist, led by the late Antonio Nieva, a former NPC president.

Let Tony Zumel tell the story himself, in a brief account that he wrote for Liberation, official publication of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF), in January 2000, before he passed away.

"For me, the periods from the FQS (1970) to the imposition of martial law is most important because this was when my appreciation of the Philippine society and my entire worldview underwent transformation. From being a petty-bourgeois liberal in the early part of my life, which included 18 years as journalist, I became a revolutionary of the national democratic movement by September 1972.

"I was elected president of the National Press Club o the Philippines for the years 1969-1970 and 1970-71. These were the crucial years in the formation of the national democratic movement and revolution. The NPC, including myself, was pulled into the dynamics of the developments.

"What initially brought me and the NPC in contact with the ND activists was the case of the Dumaguete Times in Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental. The military arrested the entire staff and placed them incommunicado. As NPC president, I immediately issued a statement demanding the release of the young journalists. We raised a lot of noise in the media. We succeeded. It turned out that the government had no legal case against them, no matter that the staff were members of the KM.

"My association with the Dumaguete Times journalists brought me somewhat close to the KM and its leaders, and to the ND mass movement as a whole. In the ensuing period, people from the movement became close to me, or tried to be close to me and to other "progressives" in the NPC.

"I was initially impressed by the program of the ND movement. At the outset of the FQS, my sympathies were for the movement. It was in my desire to help the ND movement (and even the Lavaites) to get close to the mass media that I opened the door of the NPC to their leaders and spokespersons. My principal interest was to facilitate and promote good relations between the NPC and the movement, and to help get the movement sufficient space and time (in the case of radio or TV) in the mass media.

"I joined the discussion group (DG) in the mass media headed by Ka Satur (Ocampo). MY systematic learning of the ND movement and its principles moved me closer to it. I was no longer just a disinterested bystander.

"In May 1970, I ran for re-election as NPC president. Charlie del Rosario (then secretary-general of the KM, who disappeared and was presumed abducted and slain by the military in 1971) and a group of ND activists at the NPC's Plaridel Hall chanted slogans in support of our ticket. At the third floor the Lavaites distributed my handbills. At the NPC National convention preceding the election, we got the convention to approve a resolution aligning the NPC to the development for change.

"My participation in the ND movement increased. I became an actual participant, joining one gathering or march as my work in the NPC and the Bulletin Today staff allowed it. Upon the death of our friend and comrade Ka amado V. Hernandez, I became chairman of the amado V. Hernandez Memorial Foundation, which our group with Ka Satur set up. With Tony Tagamolia, who was then the editor-in-chief of the UP Collegian and president of the revitalized College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), we republished Jose Ma. Sison's book, "Struggle for National Democracy."

"I was soon invited to speak at ND public gatherings, including on or two occasions in Plaza Miranda. Ka Satur was the work horse, but I assisted in putting out Tingga, our small paper for mass media people.

"When the Preparatory Commission of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) was set-up in 1971, I was invited to become a members.

"When my second term was about to end in May 1971, our mass media group moved to ensure that the next NPC president could not be a lackey of Malacanang.

"I went underground on the night when martial law went into effect on September 23, 1972 and have been there ever since."

There are a number of points I can add to what Tony Zumel wrote about those days of NPC militancy.

What our media group did, besides conducting political discussions and studies among selected journalists with progressive bents, was try to raise the level of unity and militancy of media workers so that they could better struggle and win more benefits from managements. We try to achieve that through direct organizational work among the unions and through the publication and distribution among the unionists of Tingga.

One of our indefatigable colleagues was Henry Romero, a reporter of Taliba and later of the Bulletin, who "disappeared" during the early period of marital rule.

Before he declared martial law, Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus on August 21 1971, a few hours after the grenade-bombing of the Liberal Party's miting de avance for the senatorial elections scheduled in November. Several activists were subsequently rounded up and arrested. In response, civil libertarians led by Senator Jose W. Diokno organized the Movement of Concerned Citizens for Civil Liberties (MCCCL), which campaigned for the lifting of the writ suspension.

The NPC became the seat of the MCCCL secretariat, with then NPC president Amando Doronilla as secretary-general. Manila Times publisher Joaquin "Chino" Roces actively supported the MCCCL, joining its protest marches and demonstrations that invariably started at the NPC grounds. Fellow journalists who marched with chino Roces then recall with fondness how, soak to the skin by a heavy downpour, the Times publisher gamely bought "binatog" from a street vendor and shared it with everyone around him.

Marcos lifted the writ suspension in February 1972.

About what Tony Zumel wrote - that our media group ensured those who succeeded him as NPC presidents could not be lackeys of Malacanang - was fulfilled.

 Amando Doronilla became an activist NPC president, and his successor Eddie Monteclaro also stood up for Marcos. After Marcos declared martial law and the military detained several journalist, including Chino Roces, Eddie Monteclaro, aided by then practicing lawyer, now Senator Joker P. Arroyo,
filed a petition for habeas corpus for the release of the detained journalists. It took some time, however, before Marcos set them free.

Even as Tony Zumel, Bobbie Malay, Henry Romero and I carried on the struggle in the underground revolutionary movement, other journalists influenced by the ND movement persisted with the anti-dictatorship struggle within the Philippine media. After the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983, militancy in the press gained momentum.

 By 1984, when the leadership of the NPC had gone back to the militants, the club, with Tony Nieva as president celebrated the first Press Freedom Day under martial law, on August 31, Del Pilar's birthday. As a political prisoner at the time writing a column Jose Burgos' pioneering We Forum, I was allowed a day's pass by then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile to address the celebration as key note speaker. Reporting on the event Malaya said in part; "If a journalist like Ocampo could still be incarcerated at a time when his colleagues are celebrating press freedom day, then, when is the local press be truly free? Ocampo gave the answer at the Plaridel Hall. "He said that the press will only be free if the people whom he serves shall be free."

That event paved the way for the fight to freedom, after more than nine years of military detention, on May 5, 1985 - courtesy of the NPC. Allowed another day time pass to participate in the annual NPC convention and election, I made good my escape back into the revolutionary underground. The following year Marcos was ousted by People Power 1. ###
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