Qwertyman for Monday, July 17, 2023

THE NEWS of Amando “Doro” Doronila’s recent passing in Canberra at age 95 marked the end of an era, as Doro was the last of his generation of journalists who made newspapers and their Op-Ed pages compelling reading. Whichever side of the political fence they were on, these journalists and columnists gave it all they had; many reveled in their prominence and some shamelessly parlayed their influence into all manner of profitable enterprise, back when it seemed the sensible thing to do, before the darker complicities of martial law set in.

Doro seemed to me to be above all this. His personality was, shall we say, poorly suited for TV or even radio, which was just as well, because it drew a clear line between journalists who did nothing better than think and write deeply, and those who confused their calling with show business.

I didn’t really know Doro personally. My one memorable encounter with him was when I was 18, a freshman dropout from UP who was dying to get into the newspapers, by hook or by crook. (Like some precocious teenagers, I was convinced I had the writing talent to skip journalism school. I would later pay for that hubris in tearful rewrites in the newsroom.) 

One of the doors I knocked on was that of the Manila Chronicle, which Doro was the editor of in 1972. I remember striding into its office and walking up to Doro’s desk, sucking in my stomach. He seemed puzzled to see my pimply face, which probably belonged to a messenger boy’s, except that I came empty-handed. “Yes?” What did I want? “Sir, I want to apply for a job—as a reporter,” I must have croaked, mumbling something about my writing for the Collegian and my high school paper. “How old are you?” I said that I was “going to be nineteen soon”—“soon” being about nine months away. 

I can’t recall if he looked back at me with pity or sympathy, or if he was laughing inside. I do remember him saying something like “Why don’t we talk again in a few years?” I was disappointed but not dejected; at least he didn’t throw me out of the place, or ridicule me before a roomful of the kind of people I wanted to be—hunched over typewriters, smoking up a storm, shaping tomorrow’s news, their bylines embedded crisply and imperishably on fresh paper.

Eventually, sometime that summer, and through sheer persistence, I did land a newspaper job, as a features writer and then a general-assignments reporter with the Philippines Herald, very likely the youngest fellow working full-time for the papers then. With the Herald and later Taliba  just before martial law, I met all kinds of journalists on the job, and saw how human we all were, the creatures of our noblest ambitions and pettiest grievances. One reporter I was on the police beat with loved playing cop, interrogating suspects each one of whom he was convinced was nursing a confession. Many had an enormous capacity for alcohol and the unapologetically macho bluster that came with it. Despite their gruffness, some had marshmallow hearts; two or three even took me under their wing to spare me from the usual gauntlet that rookies had to undergo. We were the peons of the profession, entry-level Hemingways and Woodwards chasing stories down the city’s tenebrous alleyways, and we loved every minute of it.

That was our world, but when I reported to the newsroom in the afternoon to file my story, I was ever aware that even above the copyeditors’ desk was another tier of men (as they mostly were) who perorated boisterously in a corner office on the day’s politics over scotch and cigars, the people whose opinions mattered and who made opinion matter. Never having worked with or for Doronila, I could only imagine him in that company, sitting sagely with his fingers crossed while allowing the thunder to roll above his head.

Today, half a century later, and finding myself just as old or even older than those titans of Philippine journalism then, I can savor the irony of having the privilege to write an Op-Ed column in times that mirror, in many ways, the early 1970s—with a Marcos in Malacañang, an opposition at bay, a scandal a week, and yet a people hard at work, striving for economic and moral deliverance. 

The great difference is that newspapers no longer have a monopoly of opinion-forming; that ground has been taken over by the Internet and social media (and elsewhere, by early-morning and late-afternoon AM radio, perhaps the hardiest of public platforms). Certainly, some Op-Ed stars remain—again on either side of the political divide—with faithful followers in need of sharper articulation and affirmation of their own sentiments. But even those readers tend to be aged or aging, people with the time and patience to read prose in paragraphs instead of bullets and memes, and who might even look for and appreciate that elusive quality called “style.” (Doronila’s no-frills prose, to be honest, was straight and guileless to the point of being starchy.) These 1,000-word pieces we produce now belong to what they call “long-form” writing, as if to write and read them were a test of endurance. 

But against the cheeky punchiness of Twitter and the ugly street brawls on Facebook, and above all stylistic considerations, I have to applaud this new generation of journalists (not all of them for sure) for their adherence to the truth and to fact-based reporting, and for holding themselves up to a higher standard of ethical behavior than their predecessors. Battling the bots and trolls of disinformation, they put their lives and well-being on the line, story by story, column by column; most are young, many are women, some even gay—the old gray men of the newsroom no longer dictate the headlines or the editorial slant. I think Doro himself would have been happy to see this, having mentored many of his successors.

And so as we grieve Amando Doronila’s demise at an age few of us can hope to approach, we can celebrate the continuity of upholding courage, virtue, and incorruptibility in Philippine journalism, with deepest thanks for the example the man set for us to follow.

(Photo by Pablo Tariman on FB)