Bought, muzzled
THE
Camarines Sur II Electric Cooperative, Inc., in large part
represented by the wise members of its Board of Directors, once
again reared its ugly head, its pea-sized and yet wily brain
weltering as usual in some warped sense of values and priorities.
Only a few days ago, we fell from our chair, jolted by the news
that the power coop has agreed to underwrite the accumulated power
bills of a radio station in exchange for air time that will
purportedly advance the information dissemination program of the
cash-strapped electric cooperative.
Here we have two desperate conspirators scratching each other’s
back by swapping public relations job for a power consumer’s past
due accounts. It’s a blow job, if you want to be poetically frank
about it. Cooked up by the power coop’s Board of Directors, the
deal appears harmless because no actual cash is involved. All it
takes is writing off figures on each other’s book, and presto, the
power coop would hereupon look and smell good as far as the daily
broadcasts of a grateful radio station are concerned. (In the end,
baka Casureco II pa an magka-utang dahil sa sobrang kaoomaw kan
mga over- eager na mga announcer asin anchorman kan radyong iniho).
It’s news for sale, no matter how you look at it. Such conspiracy
technically redounds to the coop’s systems loss and unrealized
income, while paying households struggle from drowning, if they
haven’t drowned yet, in a sea of rising monthly power bills.
The perverted “exchange deal” stinks as it sets a nasty precedent
that may soon kiss good judgement and proper accounting procedure
goodbye. Already, other radio stations whose unpaid power
consumptions run in hundreds of thousands of pesos are looking
forward to a similar bailout. One day, all our radio stations and
weeklies will be singing hymns of praise releases while the power
coop collapses because of financial mismanagement by foxy and yet
morally-bankrupt coop directors and officers, and uncollected
power bills.
We know for a fact that a large segment of the local media
industry is in financial shambles. And we sympathize with that.
But this is not the way to survive with your head high. We cannot
correct a wrong with another wrong, or worse, cover-up a crime
with another crime. Any attempt to write off debt at the expense
of hard-earned consumers’ or public money to salvage private
enterprise will never be morally acceptable. Worse, the deal
unabashedly adds another black spot in the continuing saga of
corruption in the media, abetted as it were by a power coop that
is reinventing media blackmail through this abhorrent debt relief
scheme. Easily, free expression and critical reporting have been
effectively muzzled by a power coop that has a lot of explaining
to do. Henceforth, we do not expect such radio station to be
reporting about Director Bonot’s misuse of the coop’s Nissan
Pathfinder and gasoline allowance to deliver bread products to
customers from his bakery shop. We do not expect to hear a report
that Dir. Bonot caused the vehicle’s repair at the staggering
amount of P90,000 so that he could drive it again and again for
his and his family’s personal use. And while cruising along, Dir.
Bonot can comfortably listen to his favorite radio station that
says nothing about his and his colleagues’ transgressions.
