Flak me, baby, flak me!

This article from the Columbia Journalism Review sent my black PR heart all a-flutter. In a nutshell, the CJR reports that the public’s access to truthful and unbiased health-related news is being compromised as more and more news organizations across the United States use hospital-produced stories as part of their regular programming. As a practitioner of sorts I am always looking for new and creative ways to flog my client’s agenda to various media outlets and I am always excited to hear about successful PR efforts.

Of course this kind of quasi-journalism isn’t new in the Philippines where relationships with the right media people can land you (or more accurately, your client) a good spot in the news. Personally, I’ve always had a love-hate feeling towards public relations. As a reader, I hate it when editors get sloppy and let in too many PR stories in their pages. But on the other hand, I can’t deny that I feel a sense of fulfillment (albeit short-lived) whenever I see my client in the papers. A story means that your days of writing, scheming and groveling have paid off—for now. And in spite of myself, I can’t help but feel gleeful admiration whenever I see a good PR story take prominent place in the news. Bully for you fellow flaks!

Selling stories to the media isn’t really as shocking as it sounds. That, in essence, is what flaks do. What’s apparently disturbing about the CJR story is that it involves institutions whose supposed mandate is to care for sick people. But stripped of this lofty directive a hospital is really just a service-oriented business. And as such, it needs to take care of its bottomline. If selling feel-good but self-aggrandizing stories to an unsuspecting public is what will keep the “customers” coming then so be it. In the end, the onus falls on the media.

For all of the effort that goes into award-winning campaign strategies, brilliantly-crafted messages and well-written stories, PR is really all about getting your client out there. Sometimes it entails using disingenuous methods to get your stories across. It’s not pretty but it’s how flaks are measured in the end. And yes, even as I write this I suspect my soul is slowly turning hot and crispy in one of Hell’s many circles. But as Daffy Duck so eloquently lisped, “Well, it’sth a living.”

The Epidemic
By Trudy Lieberman

When 19 thousand viewers tuned in to the 7 a.m. news on KTBC-TV, the local Fox channel in Austin,Texas, in mid-January, they heard the anchor, Joe Bickett, introduce a story about a new electronic rehabilitation system for injured kids. “Sharon Dennis has more on that,” Bickett said. Dennis then described how a lively fifteen-year-old named Merrill, who had sprained her ankle, was getting better thanks to the computer-guided rehab program that Cleveland Clinic researchers are calling “the world’s first virtual-only gym.”

The professional-looking story had that gee-whiz feel so typical of TV health news, explaining how the technology was making it easier for patients to get back to normal. It ended with “Sharon Dennis reporting.”

Viewers could be forgiven if they thought they were seeing real news reported by one of the station’s reporters. But Sharon Dennis does not work for KTBC. The story had been fed to the station by the Cleveland Clinic, the health care behemoth. Dennis, who earned her broadcasting bona fides at ABC News and at KOMO-TV in Seattle, works in Cleveland as the executive producer of the Cleveland Clinic News Service, in a windowless office on the fourth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel on the clinic’s sprawling 140-acre campus. There the clinic has constructed broadcast facilities for Dennis and her four-person staff, complete with three cameras, a background set, and an ON AIR sign purchased at Target. Every day, Dennis sends out prepackaged stories to, among others, Fox News Edge, a service for Fox affiliates that in turn distributes the pieces to 140 Fox stations. What Texas viewers heard that January morning was a script written at the Intercontinental Hotel.

Read the rest of the story

Sugod ever mga kafatid!

I am posting Michael Tan's column in toto to express support for Ang Ladlad's struggle against the Comelec. Though it seems like Ang Ladlad has lost the fight, I'm still glad that there was a fight to begin with. Ang Ladlad's struggle represents every gay Filipino's struggle for recognition and respect. This is only the beginning.

Abangan ang susunod na kabanata...

Phantom voters, phantom genders
MANILA, Philippines -- Danton Remoto and thousands of other Filipinos are fuming mad at Ben Abalos and the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Beyond the computer snafus and printing fiascoes, beyond the questions about whether they can count or not, Comelec officials are coming under fire now about the way they accredit party lists. While approving the applications of groups with the most obscure of constituencies (some nothing more than relatives of big shots), the Comelec has turned down the application of Ang Ladlad, which Remoto founded and which wants to give a voice to Filipino LGBTs (lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered).

The Comelec claims Ang Ladlad is a party of “phantom voters.” Hmmm, phantom voters? I thought of the comic books of my youth and that hunk running around in skin-tight leotards and an eye mask, but the Comelec means something else: it claims that Ang Ladlad’s constituencies are unreal, are phantasms.

This reminds us that beyond the issue of party-list representation, Philippine society still has serious hang-ups about genders, an issue I’ve brought up in several columns.

Pink vote

The Comelec represents the gender ostriches, the ones who would like to think the world only has two genders and any claims to the contrary can’t be true. The LGBTs are mere phantoms lurking in the night.

Yet, we know there are many Filipinos who do recognize the other genders and are terrified, thinking we face an epidemic of “sexual perverts.” I am not exaggerating the fears here. I have been getting reports about a former Department of Health employee who goes around lecturing in different cities claiming that there is a global conspiracy, headed by the United States, to control population. According to this imaginative woman, this involves imposing family planning—and promoting homosexuality!

We’ll never really have reliable figures about the size of the LGBT constituency. We hear 10 percent cited quite often, based on the Kinsey survey in the United States back in the 1950s but that survey was problematic and only asked about male homosexual experience. Other more recent surveys in different countries give figures hovering between 4 percent and 6 percent. In the last Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study of the University of the Philippines, 15.1 percent of males and 3.6 percent of females said they had same-sex sex (sorry for the awkward terminology).

But surveys are always difficult to conduct when it comes to asking people for personal disclosure on sensitive issues, which means the tendency is for the statistics to under-represent reality.

Ang Ladlad has sent out a text message calling for a show of force: “On Friday the 13th (I think that’s supposed to sound ominous), 10 a.m., gays and lesbians will rally in front of the Comelec to show we are not the phantom, but the opera. Pls wear pink, white or come in costume. And join us in a show of the Pink Vote.”

Hidden genders

I’m sure the event will be well attended, but there might be almost as many media people (some themselves LGBT) as “phantom” voters. The problem again is that the rally is public and many LGBTs are not about to come out yet.

We need to go back in history to understand how we’ve progressed -- or regressed with gender rights. In the past, we had “lalaki” [male] and “babae” [female] and an occasional “bakla” [gay] who would get beaten up. But even amid that repression, there were already quite a few courageous “bakla” who were quite open about it. Philippine society responded by allowing certain occupational niches for the “bakla,” particularly hairdressing, dress designing, doing the laundry (yes, “bakla” used to be “lavanderas” [laundrywomen]!). Besides “bakla,” there were other words used, notably “binabae,” “biniboy’’ and “syoki.” All these terms reflected not so much sexual orientation than a concept of an effeminate male, “binabae” meaning “like a woman,” “biniboy” being a contraction of “binibini” [miss] and “boy” while “syoki” came from the Hokkien Chinese word that means weak-spirited.

With time, those terms have become almost extinct, perhaps emblematic of the way the “weak-spirited” stereotype has been challenged. It’s inevitable, as a global movement grows around the rights of sexual minorities. In the 1950s, “gay” was a term used to refer to the underground male homosexual culture; by the 1970s, thousands of women and men were marching in the streets proclaiming Gay Pride and protesting social discrimination. Filipinos were swept up by this growing awareness of the need to fight social prejudice and bigotry.

Pepper Boys

Many gains have been made to advance gender rights, of women, and of the LGBT. By and large though, gender discrimination remains prevalent, forcing many LGBTs to remain in the shadows. There’s a class factor to all this. In the past, the ones who dared to come out -- as captured in the term “ladlad” (to shed one’s cape) -- were mainly from the low-income groups. Now, more upper-class Filipinos are coming out, but still with trepidation because of the fear of being disowned, of bringing “shame” to the family name, of losing one’s job.

The shifts in gender labels actually reflect this paranoia. I hear people differentiating themselves as “discreet gays” from “parloristas” [beauty parlor attendants], a reference made with the kind of derision that accompanies “palengkera,” referring to a loud, lower-class woman market vendor.

The need to be discreet has given rise to the gender category “paminta,” which gives a new meaning to Spice Boys. “Paminta” means pepper, but the word is derived from “pa-mhin.” Further translation: “mhin” means “men” and “pa-mhin” means trying to be masculine, as society requires men to be. To be “paminta” is an attempt to escape society’s homophobic radar screens or sometimes even “gay-dar” (the radar screens of other gay men).

There’s more. Some of the Pepper Boys do a good job of it, and are called “pamintang buo” (whole pepper); others fail miserably and are mocked as “pamintang durog” (ground pepper).

“Discreetness” has become an obsession, sometimes a desperate attempt at camouflage. It’s not surprising then that even the English word “bisexual” has mutated in the Philippines to mean a “discreet gay” who insists on clinging to the last vestiges of acceptable sexuality, meaning having some kind of attraction for women. I once interviewed a Pepper Boy who said he was bisexual, but it turned out that in his 30-plus years of existence he only had one tryst with a woman, way back in his youth, when his macho “barkada” [gang of buddies] forced him to have sex in a brothel.

Filipino hidden gender categories go beyond sexual orientation; they speak of a liminal and, yes, phantom-ic, existence that is always in danger of becoming even more oppressive as religious conservatives go on the offensive like what they are doing now.

Phantom genders, phantom voters: there’s a sizeable constituency out there. And the Comelec, by denying representation to LGBTs, makes a travesty of the party-list system.

===========

First posted 00:17:17 (Mla time) April 13, 2007
Michael Tan
opinion@inquirer.com.ph
Inquirer

Food in books

I discovered an interesting tapsilogan near where I live. Unlike the usual 24-hour tapsihan which serves only tapsi, longsi and toci (really the cornerstone of every manginginom’s repast, come to think of it), this one has a more extensive menu which includes specialty longganisas (Vigan, Lucban, Benguet, etc.), a to-die-for ginataang adobo, bulalong sinigang (imagine large chunks of lechon kawali in sinigang broth made from beef bulalo—killer!) and deep-fried tawilis. I am a recent and eager convert of tawilis and try to eat it whenever and wherever I can get it. So I was happy to learn that Extra Rice (as this tapsilogan is gloriously called) serves tawilis. As I savored the crunchiness of the fish I thought, now I finally have something else to relate to Noli Me Tangere other than tinola. Yes, I’m weird that way. For some reason I always think of Padre Damaso whenever I eat tinola. Sisa and the loving way she prepared tawilis for her two boys also left a lasting impression but since I haven’t tasted tawilis up until a few months ago, I couldn’t really relate. Well Sisa, you are now part of my gastronomic landscape.

Anyway, my Extra Rice epiphany made me think of some of the more memorable grub in the books I read.

Oyster “he” Stew – Chesapeake, James Michener
There’s fat oysters, bacon, milk and butter, what more can you ask for?

Hot rolls and butter – Three Fat Women of Antibes, W. Somerset Maugham
Read this short story while on a diet and you’ll understand why.

Elegant Old World Filipino merienda – Cave and Shadows, Nick Joaquin
Parang mas sumasarap kasi ang tsokolate at ensaymada kung nakiki-kain ka lang sa bahay ng mayayaman.

Manna from heaven – Book of Exodus, The Bible
My Bible had pictures and the manna looked like pan de coco.

Rabbit – The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Edith Nesbitt
I loved the Bastable children and their strong attachment to sweets and rabbit dinners. That is, until I grew up and had Bunny Unit No. 1 (God rest your fat soul my sweet Unibit).

Spit-roasted wild boar, peacock tongue, jellied eels and other strange fare from the Middle Ages – The Once And Future King, T.H. White
I’m really just very curious.

Strangely enough, I wasn’t turned on by the food in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. The hot bathroom scene was more memorable. I’m not a fan of Chinese food so Amy Tan doesn’t do it for me either. Anyway, I’m sure I’m forgetting many others.

A writer's life

This speech by Turkish writer and Nobel prizewinner Orhan Pamuk is by far the most insightful piece I read on the joys, agony, solitude and yes, even occasional pettiness of writers.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding words to empty pages, I feel as if I were bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way that one might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

Read the entire Nobel lecture

Neighborly hate

I can say it now. I despise our neighbor. I welcomed Easter Sunday by screaming in the general direction of their house, “Puwede bang patahimikin niyo iyang aso niyo!”, and then sic-ing the association’s security on their ass.

You know that Filipino expression “Biruin mo na ang lasing, huwag lang ang bagong gising?” Well, I was both lasing and bagong gising. And if that wasn’t enough, I had this awful menstrual cramp. So yeah, the pesky neighbor was bound to get it.

I think my dislike began when they were still renovating the house. I suffered through months of waking up to “Kadyot lang, kadyot lang! Naka-Love ka pa ba?” courtesy of their lecherous, foul-mouthed karpinteros. (Karpinteros tap a hidden rage in me. Karpinteros and security guards, actually.) Of course their karpinteros’ choice of radio station wasn’t their fault, but it added up against them nonetheless. However, they personally became less than endearing when they built their roof so close to our house that if their alulod ever breaks, their run-off would fall straight down our backyard. The fact that my mother had to write several irate letters and do some serious lobbying with the association before they finally agreed to trim their roofline says a lot about the kind of people they are. Still, I suspended judgment.

They moved in right before the New Year and celebrated by setting up and lighting their fireworks as early as 7pm. Of course, it never occurred to them that blocking one side of the road with their fireworks whilst living three meters away from the village’s only entrance would fuck up the flow of traffic. But then I thought: New Year, new home. Maybe they’re just feeling really celebratory.

Then they started climbing our water tank to pick guava off our tree. Now I hate that tree. I actually don’t care if they pluck out the thing from its roots. But what truly pisses me off is the noise that accompanies their fruit-picking. Must they really shout and laugh loudly? Can’t they steal in silence? And who the hell picks fruit off their neighbor’s tree in this day and age?!

And then there are those infernal dogs. I used to have dogs when I was a kid. But as I grew older, I began to dislike their neediness and incessant barking. Hence, my cats. But I don’t hate dogs. What I do hate are dog owners who stick their dogs in cages and allow them to bark for hours and hours. For fuck’s sake, if you’re gonna get a dog, let him run around otherwise he’s gonna end up barking his head off. And YES, annoying the neighbors in the process. If you’re really an asshole and couldn’t care less if your dog’s unhappy then let him be unhappy somewhere else like in your closet or your car. Anyplace that actually muffles the sound of his barking. Or better yet, don’t get a dog at all.

Having said all that, here’s my post-Easter message to you Annoying Inconsiderate Neighbor: AJI-NO-MOTO.

Meow

Caught parts of the god-awful Halle Berry Catwoman on cable. And since I couldn’t stand Berry’s pathetic attempts to be a sexy pussy, I decided to pop in Batman Returns and watch Michelle Pfeiffer’s brilliant Catwoman instead. And then because I am sometimes retarded enough to wonder about such things, I thought: If I die, would Pepe and Cleo invite their pusakal friends to rally around my lifeless body to bestow the breath of life? More importantly, what kind of Catwoman would I be if I’m fat? Would I be able to do cartwheels and leap and kick ass like Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry? Can superhuman abilities transcend body mass? Would I look just as lovely in a catsuit and four-inch heels?

Hmmm. Maybe not.

I read somewhere that the Hindus and Buddhists believe that being reincarnated as a cat is a step towards achieving Nirvana. So maybe this “cats bringing you back to life” can also be a symbolic thing, like cats helping to make sure that you come back as, well, a cat.

So okay, let me amend my retarded fantasy. If I die and my cats and their friends can’t suck off a gazillion pounds (on top of the breath of life deal) so I’d look like Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, then I’d rather go with the other thing, which is, me being reincarnated as a cat.

And I know just the kind of cat I’d be.

Yeah. "I don’t know about you Ms. Kitty but I feel so much yummier.”