Ipe Salvosa and Bobi Tiglao

As long as we have journalists like Felipe Salvosa II, the likes of Bobi Tiglao don’t matter.

Salvosa provided a much-needed silver lining last week at the time when dark clouds of lies threatened to overwhelm the public pre-occupied with the business of surviving.

Until last week, Salvosa was Manila Times managing editor. He was fired for voicing his reservations about the story his newspaper was putting out.

I’m using the word “fired” because he himself admitted that he was asked to resign by management over his tweet posted early afternoon of April 22 which said: “A diagram is by no means an evidence of ‘destabilization’ or an ‘ouster plot.’ It is a very huge stretch for anyone to accuse PCIJ, Vera Files and Rappler of actively plotting to unseat the President. I know people there and they are not coup plotters.”

Salvosa’s tweet was questioning the banner story of his own newspaper, written by no less than its Chairman Emeritus Dante A. Ang about an alleged plot to oust Duterte complete with a matrix alleging that I acted “as the nexus and distributor” of the “Bikoy” video which narrated the alleged involvement of the President’s family members in the illegal drug trade.

Ang’s story alleged that I distributed the Bikoy video to Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Rappler and National Union of People’s Lawyers.

The article was not only badly written, it was false. It’s a classic example of fake news – manufactured to deliberately deceive.

Ang, a veteran in public relations, is President Duterte’s Special Envoy for International Public Relations.

In resigning, Salvosa, who teaches journalism at the University of Santo Tomas, said, “I want to be able to teach and still look my students straight in the eye.”

Contrast Salvosa to Manila Times columnist Bobi Tiglao, who repeated the same outrageous allegations about media people trying to oust Duterte in his column, also last Monday.

I used to admire Tiglao’s articles when he was correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review.
I like his book, “Colossal Deception- How foreigners control our telecoms sector” exposing businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan as dummy for Indonesian magnate Anthoni Salim.

He was one of VERA Files’ resource persons in a forum we organized for our Media Ownership Monitoring project in 2016.

Tiglao impressed me as someone with a superior mind. It is with great dismay then reading his error-filled columns.
He keeps on saying foreign funding is illegal. It is not.

The Constitution prohibits foreign ownership and management of media. There is no prohibition on taking of foreign grants.

How deeply Tiglao has sunk is demonstrated by his FB post last week which said “I’m 100% certain the Bikoy video was a (Trillanes-Tordesillas) operation. Hindi nga nakatiis si Tordesillas to announce a day before the video was posted.

Then he posted my tweet on April 1 which said: “Kung April Fools’ ngayon, anong meron bukas? Abangan 04.02.19”

For the information of Tiglao, April 2 is IFCN Day. IFCN is International Factchecking Network which accredits fact checkers all over the world. VERA Files is an IFCN accredited factchecker.

To mark IFCN Day, VERA Files conducted an online quiz game. The April Fools Day promo was to drum up our quiz game.

Bobi, you are pathetic.