Reporters treat kidnapping as minor story

It seems most newspapers and radio and TV news networks are not interested in the story of a young Japanese woman who was held for ransom by some agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) for one month.

The arrest and detention of Noriyo Ohara, 33, hasn’t been given much attention either because there are more interesting and pressing stories like the quarrel between the President and the Chief Justice, or the other news outlets would not admit to being scooped by this columnist.

I stumbled on the story after Ohara’s foster family complained to me.

Even my own newspaper, the Inquirer, and Radyo Inquirer-dzIQ, where I have the public service show, “Isumbong Mo Kay Tulfo,” carried Ohara’s story only once and didn’t make any follow-up reports.

Do other journalists consider Ohara’s kidnapping by the NBI an insignificant story?

When members of a premier law enforcement agency such as the NBI are involved in a heinous crime, isn’t that story front-page stuff?

When Justice Secretary Leila de Lima ordered the creation of a three-member fact-finding panel to look into allegations by this columnist that a Japanese woman was kidnapped for ransom by the NBI, wasn’t that story big enough to merit space on the front page or the “second” front page?

Are journalists nowadays so jaded they consider the kidnapping of a foreigner by lawmen a story not even worth being placed in the inside pages?

Forgive me for giving you a sermon, guys, but when I was a police reporter, the Ohara kidnapping would have been the banner headline in any newspaper and the No. 1 story in the TV network news.

Either you or your editors don’t have the “nose” for news like Ohara’s kidnapping.

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If reporters covering the DOJ only took pains to know what went on inside the closed-door investigation by the three-member panel led by Undersecretary Francisco Baraan III, they would have stumbled upon interesting tidbits, such as:

That every office or division within the NBI is run like a fiefdom, independent from other offices and even from the NBI director.

That there is no distinction between a  security guard, tasked with securing the NBI premises and facilities, and an NBI line agent, who is either a lawyer or certified public accountant.

NBI security guards go on missions like NBI line agents without authority from the NBI director.

The people who arrested Ohara and demanded ransom for her release were NBI security guards.

Director Magtanggol Gatdula admitted as much in a letter to this columnist.

That there are persons who are not organic members of the bureau who hang around the NBI premises and pass themselves off as NBI agents.

That the NBI, patterned after the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), is as corrupt as the Philippine National Police (PNP) and needs to be overhauled.