The free press of the Philippines is a national glory. Yet it is often troubled. The dictator Marcos suppressed it for years. And, every day, a variety of insidious pressures undermines its integrity. Newspaper owners bend the news to serve private interests. Reporters sell their pens. Editors succumb to market forces that favor sensational stories over sober facts, all the more so the sorts of sober economic facts RAUL L. LOCSIN specializes in. In his career of four decades, LOCSIN has withstood these pressures. In doing so, he has nurtured business reporting in the Philippines from infancy to robust maturity.
RAUL LOCSIN received his early schooling at his mother’s knee in wartime Negros Occidental, where his father published a Spanish-language newspaper. In a youthful venture with his brother, LOCSIN also published a local newspaper. Then, for eleven years, he became a salesman. He hated it, he says. Taking a huge cut in pay, he joined the Manila Chronicle and gravitated to the business section.
It was the early 1960s. Economic development was the watchword of the era; GNP measured a country’s success or failure. LOCSIN knew that few people understood what “GNP” meant, not to mention other terms favored by the region’s rising technocrats: current account, deficit spending, aggregate demand. Discerning the need to make complex economic information comprehensible to the public, in 1967 he founded Business Day, Southeast Asia’s first daily newspaper devoted to business.
Credibility was the key to his success. LOCSIN made a pact with his readers that Business Day would be fair and accurate, that it would strive for balance, that it would report the truth. He recruited bright, young graduates and molded them into insightful economic reporters and analysts. He sharpened them in free-wheeling office discussions and formed them into research teams to undertake exhaustive investigations. He forbade them to keep the bribes routinely offered by Manila’s influence seekers. LOCSIN also warned advertisers that only advertising space was for sale at Business Day, not “editorial space.” And he instructed his editors, on a sign at the office door, to “remove your biases and leave them here.”
Under martial law, Business Day survived as the capital’s sole independent newspaper. In a climate of disinformation, it became the gold standard for accuracy. LOCSIN tested the limits of press freedom and, in 1983, denounced the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr., in an impassioned editorial. Afterwards, Business Day contributed importantly to the rising chorus of dissent leading to the People Power Revolution of 1986. LOCSIN then led in reestablishing press freedom. Characteristically, he opposed the seizure of Marcos-friendly newspapers by the new government and reminded his readers that gross national inequalities still remained, along with “corrupt patronage politics thriving on the arrogant exercise of power and public plunder.”
Following a labor dispute in 1987, LOCSIN closed Business Day and contemplated a self-indulgent retirement. But when former employees pressed him to start up again, he did so, with one crucial change. The employees now became owners. Enhanced by computerized technology, Business World flourished from the start. Circulating today to fifty-four thousand subscribers and also “on line,” it remains a benchmark of quality.
LOCSIN led in rebuilding the Philippine Press Institute after the ravages of martial law and also the press council. He has devoted himself to strengthening the country’s hundreds of community newspapers. It matters to do so, he believes. Although a free press is only one component of democracy, it is a basic one. “All the freedoms in our Bill of Rights,” he says, “are of no use without the right to speak freely.”
In electing RAUL L. LOCSIN to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his enlightened commitment to the principle that, above all, a newspaper is a public trust.
