Eyewitness helpless on ‘rape’ of printed page
Editor’s Note: Starting Sept. 21, the 42nd anniversary of the proclamation of martial law by President Ferdinand Marcos, we have been running a series of articles to remember one of the darkest chapters in Philippine history. The articles are necessarily commemorations and more so a celebration of and a thanksgiving for the courage of the men and women who endured unspeakable pain and loss to overcome the Marcos dictatorship and regain our freedoms. These are some of their stories.
MANILA, Philippines–Those were the years of writing dangerously.
Editor’s Note 2: This piece was written on the spot when the author observed the editorial page in the Panorama magazine issue of Oct. 12, 1980, which was ordered torn off the already-printed magazine. So, the final issue of the magazine had no Pages 1 and 2. The author happened to be at Liwayway publications to file a story for the following week and watched the unfolding scene from a second-floor glass-paneled window. Then and there, in anger and hurt, she wrote about the blatant censorship in full view of disapproving onlookers.
The Liwayway press on Pasong Tamo, Makati City, like so many other bigger printing establishments, situates its printing press on the ground floor, the assembly and shipping sections located at the farthest end of the same floor of that long building, all of which sections provide an awesome panorama when seen through glass panels from the second floor—all the more awesome for the fact that the next sheet it will churn through its rollers could be your printed story.
Today, though, something is off. A couple of staffers are craning their necks, straining their eyes, to watch something happening at the far end of the ground floor. Two more are smoothing out crumpled sheets and taking them to the IBM room close by, where someone sits frenetically typesetting from the crumpled sheets, then running over to the third group, who are feverishly laying out what is obviously a Letter to the Editor page to replace the offensive page.
I run back to the glass panel through which this ominous cycle seems to begin. Far below in the assembly and shipping section, they are ripping off the first page of all the copies of the Panorama magazine, the Sunday supplement of the Bulletin Today, stacked and ready for distribution.
‘Enough’
My eyes focus but my mind is not as quick to follow. The men around me are shaking their heads, looking very grim.
One of them speaks, finally, to explain that what is being violently torn off is an offensive editorial which The Boss has spotted while prowling through his presses, and has ordered destroyed.
Thus we silently watch what can only be described as the rape of the printed page. Violation! And we are helpless to come to the aid of the violated press—to overpower her abductors—to say enough! That is enough! The printed page has suffered enough!
And we, who cause it to become letters and words, on a page, in a magazine, or a newspaper, or a journal, who labor through words composed in the dark night—when our children are asleep, when the last balut vendor has put his basket away for the day—to communicate, to be a touchstone, to care for our fellowmen (for we are, in the press, as in another profession, our brother’s keeper), to bring joy, sharpen awareness, caution, criticize or edify, observe, applaud, snicker, surprise, salute, celebrate, look inward into our deepest emotions to articulate the sum of what we find and cause it, painfully, laboriously, to become words—we have suffered enough.
THOSE WERE THEDAYS Former “We Forum” publisher-editor Jose Burgos Jr. is interviewed
by journalists, including Joan Orendain (second from left) and Mike Suarez of the Associated Press
(third from left), in a picket at the justice department following the forced resignation of Panorama
magazine editor Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc during the rule of dictator Ferdinand Marcos.Magsanoc
is now editor in chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where Suarez now works as INQUIRER News
Service editor. The photo is from the book “The Philippine PressUnder Siege.”
Last freedom
Freedom of the press, for the press, is its only freedom, its only reason for being in the first place, its last freedom. Possibly, this is not just rape. Perhaps we have just witnessed, in what cannot possibly be a more totally graphic demonstration than this, the death of this last freedom.
We mourn its passing—and ours—as writers in a free press.
This piece is written in lieu of a terrible anger. We are stunned.
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