Editor in Taiwan

An airport official confirmed a city hall insider’s tip to onion-skinned that this female editor of a Cebu daily was with city hall officials and department heads on a hush-hush trip to Taiwan in August.

Nothing wrong there, especially if you’re especially chummy with a male department head (I guess when you’re tied to one, it’s Taiwan, take one). Except that certain quarters (onion-skinned among them) are regurgitating their food, remembering how this female editor had, in the past, subjected her staff to extended lectures, and unwarranted hassles, on the ethics of traveling with news sources, even on legitimate coverages.

This is the same female editor who ordered her reporters to return customary Christmas gifts(even if allowed by the code of ethics) given by the Capitol (and only by the Capitol; no mention about gifts from other sources) in Christmas 2006. Typically hypocritically, she was dancing and prancing on her way home from a Christmas party thrown by another news source, a brand-new appliance heavy on her shoulders.

So what’s this? What’s sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for the gander? Is this why this Cebu daily’s coverage of city hall and its officials is extremely, sometimes disgustingly, friendly?

Maybe the publisher should conduct an audit of this Cebu daily’s coverage of city hall and its officials and determine whether journalistic ethics haven’t been Shanghaied by one surreptitious trip to Taiwan.