Punchline
P1.791M for one hospital bed
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
NO purpose, rhyme or reason can ever justify the proposed P43 million budget for the planned 24-bed maternal hospital by the Lim administration.
It certainly doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that to provide hospital beds at the cost of P1,791,666.67 each makes it a great-great-grandmother of all corruption. It even beats the scheme used in the helicopter scam, now being investigated by the Ombudsman, involving former FG Mike Arroyo hands down.
Even assuming that the feasibility study (which is non-existent to this day) can point to grand results for the city, one should recall that all multi-million projects of Mayor Benjie Lim in the past failed, leaving the city high and dry, with debts to pay over the next decade. Remember the P50 M loan the city had to secure to take possession of the MC Adore property? He glibly presented plans to justify its acquisition but since the property was acquired it has remained the dirtiest white elephant in the city. (That Mr. Lim has not even proposed to convert the MC Adore hotel building into the hospital makes his agenda all the more suspect).
I also recall how Mr. Lim boldly promised the city a million more in revenues from a modern public market that could compete with shopping malls. Today the P257 M Malimgas Market is heavily subsidized monthly and cannot hope to earn even just P100 a year.
Mr. Lim’s claim that P43 M for the city’s hospital will benefit the city track record is certainly not reassuring at all given his track record.
* * * * *
I was also not at all surprised that Mr. Lim did not propose an alternate flagship project where P10 M (or P43 M) fund can be put to better use minus the corruption factor.
A dedicated public servant like former Sta. Barbara Mayor Rey Velasco directed the construction of new classrooms with individual toilets at the cost of P350,000 per.
Thus for P10M alone, the city can have at least 25 brand new classrooms that will serve the future of 1,000 students every year under DepEd’s K-to-12 education system. But will Mr. Lim do it for 1,000 students daily who have nowhere to go or for 4 indigent mothers who have a choice for birthing? Mr. Lim is no Mr. Velasco so my sense of it is Mr. Lim would insist on spending the city’s P43 M for 24 beds.
Watching the proceedings of the SP hearing on USATV cable, clearly Mr. Mata did not have any detail or study to justify the initial P10M fund request for Mr. Lim’s flagship project. As in the past, the Lim administration isn’t about to give any detailed plan in writing that could compromise its hidden agenda but will simply resort to bullying the councilors into submission. My fear is, Mr. Lim’s tact might just work again given the tentativeness of the majority in council in its avowed fight for good governance.
I fervently pray, for the city’s sake, the councilors would still have the courage finally to say NO and ENOUGH!
* * * * *
PLAGIARISM AT ITS WORST. It always pains me to write about anomalous, unethical activities in the local media, but unless these are pointed out, local media practitioners and journalists can never hope to regain the respect of the community for our sector.
My attention was recently called about the seeming rampant plagiarism in many local newspapers. If you haven’t noticed there are now some 20 publications, many of which are disguised as community newspapers competing for judicial notices.
In legitimate journalism practice, editors, reporters and columnists anywhere in the world found to have knowingly plagiarized published articles are promptly fired, exposed and shunned by other publications. The gravity of such an offense was further underscored after a Supreme Court justice became the subject of an impeachment after it was discovered that the very critical decision he penned was in fact lifted from another jurisprudence in another country.
For my colleagues who have no understanding of plagiarism and believe that copying or lifting from others’ work is the easiest way to fill up empty spaces to cover-up for their laziness and inadequacies as wordsmiths, here’s a definition for them – Plagiarism in journalism is taking someone else’s report, opinion or ideas without proper attribution to the original author or source of news (newspaper, book, radio and TV) and passes them off as one’s own.
* * * * *
I was, therefore, aghast on finding out for myself how rampant the practice of plagiarism in the local media industry has become.
Many years ago, The PUNCH was a constant victim of plagiarism. A number of our competitors were lifting our photos and stories (including our share of grammatical and typo errors) like no one’s business in desperate efforts to fill up their pages in order to qualify for the privilege to publish judicial notices. Mercifully, the practice finally stopped after we wrote the concerned editors and warned them of criminal prosecution.
But it appears today that the onset of Internet with the convenience it offers to “cut-and-paste” pieces, saw many succumb to its seduction to plagiarize as well. Little did they realize that their crime can just as easily be detected by a simple search on the Internet as well.
When I did a random check on a just a few, the virtual fingerprints of plagiarists surfaced. (Simply type a sentence or a paragraph of an item in the Search box of Google or Yahoo and the list of articles that contained the same sentence will appear).
In Northern Mirror Newseekly ’s February 1 issue, a columnist plagiarized Boo Chanco’s opinion published in Philippine Star’s January 13 issue. Another columnist lifted in full (including title) from the blog written by Manali Oak last September 23, 2011 as posted in Buzzle.com. This same columnist again copied a blog written by Leslie Musuko of UK in the paper’s January 25 issue! She even had the gall to delete the portion where the original author laid claim to his knowledge about the topic, obviously to hide the crime.
The Eastern Pangasinan Gazette’s January 22 issue showed that its columnist lifted a great part from the past columns of Rina Jimenez David and Conrad de Quiroz in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, passing these as his own. Its January 13 editorial was a reprint of the Philippine Star’s January 13 editorial, with a different title. Then it published an article by Benjamin Radford that was made to appear as a contributed article to the newspaper when in fact it was lifted from Mr. Radford’s blog posted in Yahoo. Even the words of Bro. Eliseo Soriano in 2007 were not spared. These were used by another columnist in its January 22 issue.
The Pangasinan Sunday Report had a columnist in its January 29, 2012 issue who titled his article “Political Greed” and liberally lifted paragraphs from the book “In Praise of Public Life” by Joseph I. Lieberman, as if they were his.
The December 3, 2011 issue of the Pangasinan Online Balita used a November 24, 2011 news report published in the PDI as its editorial.
* * * * *
ROCK BOTTOM CREDIBILITY. It is one thing to lift a data already made public but to lift and own the idea or opinion using the same words, phrases and paragraphs in a published work of an author, columnist or a news report is no different from producing pirated DVDS, an offense punishable with imprisonment.
The credibility of the local media has definitely hit rock bottom with this unchecked practice.
I urge the Pangasinan Press Club to form its own ethics committee that would begin monitoring publications and to publicly reprimand the future recidivists. PPC should also attempt to seek an agreement with executive judges that newspapers found guilty of plagiarism shall be suspended from participating in judicial notices raffles for a period.
With these efforts, plagiarism in our midst will surely end.
Share your Comments or Reactions
Powered by Facebook Comments
