Editorial
Celebrating SUNDAY PUNCH’s 52nd Year!
Each year that passes is an opportunity for renewal of the PUNCH staff’s commitment to responsible community journalism. In reaffirming our dedication, we recall the very foundation of this commitment as spelled out by our founder Ermin E. Garcia, Sr. in the PUNCH’s maiden issue on July 15, 1956:
Statement of Policy
AS a newsmagazine the SUNDAY PUNCH seeks to play a dual role; namely; as a medium of news information and as a forum of public opinion. The second prescinds from the first. In other words, it will stimulate public thinking on the basis on objective news reports.
At the outset we wish to make our position clear vis-a-vis politics, religion, and other spheres of controversial thought. The publication is politically independent, in the sense that no politician or political group has been or will ever be allowed to be in a position to unduly influence its policies or color its news stories or its editorial columns. We shall often write on and about politicians. But never shall we write for any of them or in behalf of any partisan political cause.
We shall not deprive any religious group of access to our pages, whether for information or for opinion. At the same time we shall not make a farce of the democratic principle by defying the fact that the country – or this province- is, by majority count, Catholic.
That is our position. Now for the brand of journalism we intend to pursue. We reject the idea of a knight-in-shining armor crusade. But where the truth is concerned, we shall be ruthlessly uncompromising. It may lose us friends or potential income, but all that must be written off as part of the calculated risks of honest virile journalism. It is not just a whimsy that we have adopted the Socratic philosophy: “No man is to be reverenced more that the truth.”
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