Philippine Daily Inquirer Shoots the Judge.

Inquirer headline writers are the enemies of truth and accuracy. There, that’s only my opinion, but I’m glad to get it off my chest. I always thought it was just a hunch of mine, but now I can prove it.

This Saturday, the Philippine Daily Inquirer published a sensationalistic headline/subhead combo to pep up a rather boring interview (.PNG screencap, 1.5MB) with Isaac Robillo Jr., executive judge of the Davao regional trial court. Headline reads: “Davao judge ‘shoots’ the sheriff”, and subhead reads: “Demolition was illegal, says judge who ordered it.” On the print edition, you’ll see an illustration of “Guyito”, the carabao mascot, standing next to the article saying “Nilaglag ni judge si sheriff!” (The judge betrayed the sheriff!)

The problem begins when you read the rest of the article. Nowhere in the article does the judge assign blame to the sheriff, or hold him responsible for getting his own ass kicked. And the record makes it abundantly clear that Robillo did not order the demolition, it was another judge (Emmanuel C. Carpio) who did it.

OK, full disclosure: I’m related to Judge Robillo. He’s my uncle, the younger brother of my mom, and he is almost embarrassingly old-fashioned and straight as an arrow. (Being family doesn’t do you any favors, as my cousin Blogie Robillo found out for himself.) It pissed me off to see the Inquirer headline writers playing fast and loose with the facts of the case, making it look like he was playing politics and taking sides in this ugly legal turf war.

But one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, as per Hanlon, and I’m not accusing the Inquirer of having it in for Judge Robillo. I’m accusing their headline writers of stupidly trying to force a Bob Marley reference, never mind if the lyrics they quoted had nothing to do with the facts. So when their lame attempt at cleverness bombed, Judge Robillo’s reputation just happened to suffer collateral damage.

The factual error of ascribing the demolition order to Judge Robillo (instead of where the actual blame belongs, Judge Carpio) isn’t even stupid for the sake of cleverness, it’s just stupid, period.

It’s also insidious: the subhead suggests that Judge Robillo unreservedly declared the demolition to be illegal, but upon reading the article you see that he said no such thing – “Judge Robillo said the vice mayor was correct when he said the July 1 demolition fell short of the 30-day notice required by law,” the article says, noting Robillo’s opinion that RA 7279 is “a good law”, but nowhere does he declare outright that the demolition was illegal.

So, Inquirer, that’s two lies in one line. “Demolition was illegal, says judge” (he didn’t say it!) “who ordered it” (you mean Judge Carpio, not Judge Robillo).

(And it’s not just the headline writer phoning it in – there’s cartoonist Jess Abrera who takes the headline on face value and twists the knife even further by having the carabao say “nilaglag ni judge ang sheriff!”)

This bullshit-posing-as-news travels far and fast. A relative in Massachusetts reports that TFC carried the news item to households in the U.S., leading their nanny to ask her if she were related to the judge who ordered the demolition. And earlier this morning, I had to endure hearing the Dutertes' lawyer Atty. Salvador Panelo tell Howie Severino on News to Go that “the executive judge in Davao’s regional trial court said the demolition is illegal!” Hm, I wonder where he heard that?

I also wonder how seriously newspapers like the Inquirer treat their mandate, when they so cavalierly allow their headline writers to distort the news for the sake of a cheap laugh. To the Inquirer's credit, @inquirerdotnet’s JV Rufino responded pretty quickly when we brought this matter to his attention (you can see our ongoing Twitter conversation here, and below), although he seems rather reluctant to just change the headline outright (though they didn’t seem to have a problem changing the headline in this story – note the original headline fossilized as the story’s URL).(This has changed - see update below.)

I get it, more or less: writing news on deadline means sometimes getting things wrong. “Tao lamang” (only human) you might hear the Inquirer people mumble, but when one’s lame Bob Marley reference can cause a multiplier effect of bullshit to course unabated through worldwide channels, “tao lamang” just isn’t enough. It used to be that #newspalpak like the Inquirer “shooting” Judge Robillo got hushed up with a tiny erratum, but we’re shining the spotlight on media kapalpakan (incompetence) a little brighter from here on.

Update 7/14/11: the Inquirer did the right thing in the end – they revised the headline, added a note to explain the revision, and redirected the old URL to the new headline. And today, they published Judge Robillo’s rebuttal to the whole mess. Kudos to JV Rufino and the rest of the Inquirer staff.