By Dan Shelley, RTDNA Director at Large

 It was a Monday morning in February 2006, in a ballroom at the Marco Polo Hotel in Davao City, on the island of Mindanao – day one of a series of seminars I was conducting on media ethics for radio, television and online journalists throughout the Philippines.

I was there while I was chairman of RTDNA, at the request of the U.S. State Department. The embassy in Manila was concerned about systemic corruption among politicians and the routine murders of broadcast news reporters who covered them.

During morning break, a radio reporter approached me and asked if we could speak in private. He seemed distraught.

“I let down my audience but I didn’t know what else to do,” he explained.

It turns out that the reporter had been doing an investigative series on a corrupt politician in a small town on Mindanao in the days before a recent election. The politician called him and threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop.

“I told him he could not silence my voice, that there was nothing he could threaten to do to me that would keep me from telling the truth to the voters.

“'Fine,’ the man told me. ‘In that case, I’ll just kill your entire family.’”

To save his family, the reporter not only ended his series of reports early, he took himself off the air completely until after the election. The corrupt politician was elected.

I heard other stories during my time in the Philippines, which the Committee to Protect Journalists consistently lists among the most dangerous places on earth for people who seek and report the truth.

I heard stories of reporters being offered bribes by politicians to report damning information on their opponents. If they refused, they were killed.

I heard stories of reporters, often among the lowest-paid professionals in the Philippines, accepting such bribes, only to be offered bigger bribes from the politicians’ opponents to report damning information on the initial bribers. 

I heard stories of reporters accepting the bigger bribes, only to be murdered by henchmen of the politicians who’d paid the first bribes.

One reporter who pulled me aside during a break admitted, with tears in his eyes, that he had accepted payments to color his coverage of a politician. He knew it was wrong. He didn’t want to do it. But he had.

“What good are ethics if your children are hungry?”

Today, as I grieve over the senseless election-related murders on Mindanao, I find myself thinking about two things.

First, a question: What good is truth-seeking if the Filipino government embraces a culture that allows these kinds of massacres to happen?

Second, a prayer. Please, God, I hope the radio reporter I met in the ballroom at the Marco Polo Hotel in Davao City three and a half years ago was not among those killed.

He wanted so badly to expose the political corruption he saw all around him.