Government writers

By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas

The recent really gross mistakes of the Philippine News Agency are still “pinagpipyestahan sa social media” to quote Sec. Martin Andanar. We wrote about that already but it is not just the PNA which is giving people some entertainment. Even other government agencies that are supposed to be the bearer of good news from the government.
Let us take the case of the Philippine Information Agency (PIA). Many years back, we used to ask for news stories from the PIA of Region I whose top writers then were also reporters for a major national daily. They would not give us the news stories until after these were published in the major national daily where they were also employed. In short, working with the PIA was just a lucrative sideline for them..
Good for us here in the Cordillera because the PIA (headed by Director Helen Tibaldo) are at least serving the interest of the government and the private media. But I have some gripes which should be addressed unless they would like the mistakes to become worse and worse until these become so bad as the PNA errors.
For one, I think many of the provincial reporters or writers of the PIA are typical government employees who are just waiting for the day, or the week, or the month to end. I know many of them whose work could have been vastly improved had they exerted more effort to get all important angles. Which they could have done as they had the whole week to hone their write-ups. Sometimes the basic information are not even there. I once saw a caption of a picture sent by the PIA and it did not have the where, what and when data. How could that have been sent? But what do they care? They will be receiving their pay envelopes every 15th and 30th of the month anyway whether or not they do a sloppy work. Are these people being monitored like private employees are?
How about their missing a very important coverage? So many times in the past, I was expecting a PIA story that never came on some important government activity or concern. In the private sector a reporter who misses such an important news story would have been readily fired. Right there and then. Sometimes when the boss is in a bad mood, due process would not even be observed.
Then comes the quality of writing. What quality are we talking about? Sometimes the write-ups are so bad you could not even make heads nor tails from it. What to speak of improving their prose? Many times the one sentence caption of a picture has to take a few minutes to straighten out.
How about promptness? Well, if one goes by results of how many PIA stories are being circulated, so many are being left out because these reach media outfits quite late. We usually have already put issues of this paper to bed when the PIA stories arrive. Too late the hero. If I were the boss of that agency I would put the publication of its stories as one important measure of competence.
The PIO (Press Information Office) of City Hall is in the same boat. One writer there once told me that even if you don’t have any writing background you can be employed there if you have a backer. What else is new? Employment in government only needs an MBA (may backer ako).
Competence at the PIO? There are only two writers there whose pieces are publishable as is. All the submission of the rest need some major work. Some of them capitalize or don’t capitalize the first letter of words indiscriminately. Grammar? Drug companies are raking it in from migraine pills editors have to take after the press night.
One big error of the PIO of late was on the coverage of the State of the City Address of the mayor. It was good he did not blow his top. For the life of me, I still can’t understand why the message was “chop-chopped” into a number of news stories. One news story dealt on the message regarding athletics, another on revenues, then another on another subject, etc. Why were not the salient points culled into one big story? So instead of it becoming a headliner, parts of the message landed inside, if at all.
But the more important question is what is my contribution as an elder of the local media for the betterment of this country through more efficient government agencies disseminating information? And what is my contribution for the improvement of the competence of writers in such agencies?
Perhaps what I can do is select every now and then news stories from these agencies that really need a lot of improvement and then write my suggestions to be given to the local head of office copied (read: copy furnished) the national head of office or in the case of the PIO the city mayor. Perhaps this will imbue concerned personnel or officers with some sense of responsibility and the young ones might exert more effort to improve their writing or communication skills.
Otherwise, I am being negligent as a citizen. **