Sunday, October 12, 2008 Mercado: The just-in-case team By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
“THE angel of death has many eyes.” This Hebrew proverb came to mind on reading the news report that Mayor Tomas Osmeña flew abruptly to New York. He’ll seek a second medical opinion on an “egg-size” growth in his bladder.
“Yeah, it’s serious,” he said. “It’s like a grenade in me…But I’ve no plans of dying. The final decision is up to Santo Niño.”
In March 2002, he collapsed from a hypertensive bout. “The mayor looked into those eyes, as we all must one day, and walked away,” we wrote on his return from sick leave. “Has the long look into those eyes…endowed the mayor with a new sense of reality?” Albert Camus, after all, stressed: “The threat of mortality, which hangs over all of us, sterilizes everything.”
It should. Street cleaner, mayor or President, return to dust. “A man is here today. And tomorrow, he is gone,” Thomas a’ Kempis wrote. “And when he is taken out of sight, he is also quickly out of mind.”
Governance, however, is a “24/7” job. Its demands don’t halt when illness strikes. Mortality and responsibility clamp a special burden, specially on officials, to “think the unthinkable.” They must prepare the just-in-case team.
In March 1957, acting foreign secretary Raul Manglapus cabled Vice-President Carlos P. Garcia, then in Canberra. President Ramon Magsaysay’s plane had smashed into Mount Manunggal in Cebu, he said. Garcia should return to Manila immediately --- where he was sworn in as president.
“The vice-presidency is as useful as the fifth teat in a cow,” Harry Truman once said. And Lyndon Johnson concurred that the vice presidency was just a “pitcher of warm spit.” Both Truman and Johnson became presidents.
In life, Numero Dos can suddenly be thrust in the number one job. So, they must be selected with equal care. In “thinking the unthinkable,” chief executives, whether national or local, must train those who could come after them. Is Vice-President Noli de Castro’s main job that of asking after morning coffee: “How is the President’s health today?”
Mayor Osmeña is a public official. And the settled rule is: people have a right to information about those entrusted with official duties. So, he has tried to field legitimate questions about his health.
Corazon Aquino has stepped down from office. But she remains a respected public figure. She broke the news about her colon cancer. Her family requested that privacy be respected in her illness. The press respected that request scrupulously.
Ordinary citizens can be dragged willy-nilly into headlines by tragedy, crime or some other event. Journalists must balance competing demands: for critical information, on one hand, and personal privacy, on the other. Reporting must be full yet sensitive.
Osmeña ventilated in the last campaign health problems of a private citizen: his opponent’s father. He got flak for “sickroom snooping.” Now, the shoe is on the other foot.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Louis Brandeis first raised the privacy issue in "Harvard Law Review" (December 1890). This is now 2008. Internet meanwhile has evolved “citizen journalism” and blogging is the new kid on media square.
But the press here hasn’t developed seminal privacy guidelines more fully than, say Australia or the UK. Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) struggles with mayhem inflicted by block-time commentators who never heard of KBP’s code of ethics. Media ought to revisit the rule book--–before mortality stokes invasion of privacy controversies.“
“The cemetery is full of indispensable men,” Charles de Gaulle once said. Sadly, the more power officials grab, the blinder they become to this truth. And journalists are saddled with the thankless job of stripping away those blinders.
