Editor’s Note: Philip M. Lustre Jr. is a veteran journalist. He currently writes books, occasional opinion pieces for traditional and nontraditional media.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — I got word early this afternoon that Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Neal Cruz died early today [Tuesday, July 28] after experiencing some complications in his brain surgery.
Read: Neal H. Cruz, veteran journalist, writes 30 at 85
Neal Cruz was my editor at the defunct Philippine Tribune and Philippine Daily Globe, two newspapers that mushroomed as a result of the dismantling of the martial law regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the restoration of democracy in 1986.
Neal, a former National Press Club president, was among our leaders when we, the journalists, had collectively reclaimed the freedom and democratic space that Marcos dictatorship denied us for so many years.
But he instilled in us the responsibility and circumspection that journalists should have at the time we claimed what was dutifully ours. We could not be irresponsible in our jobs, he told us without any shed of hesitation or equivocation.
Check your facts, verify them before writing, get the other side and be fair, he kept on telling us. When in doubt, don’t write. Unless you are extremely sure of story and you can defend it when challenged, that’s the only time to write it, he said.
Neal’s journalistic legacy is his sense of fairness of equanimity. He did not mind being challenged. He answered questions on his editorial judgment. He faced us squarely.
Yet, he did not harbor grudges all through the years. Those dynamics were part of the job. We left all those dynamics in the newsroom. In brief, he was never personal even we disagreed with his policies and judgments.
Neal and I share the same contempt on those dime-a-dozen “political analysts,” who have been proliferating whenever we have those runups to some political exercises, or elections.
“Don’t you know they are anals?” he told me with an air of authority. “You don’t even know their credentials. How dare you quote them?”
I wrote two or three news stories quoting those “anals” and, true to his word, Neal threw those stories straight into the waste basket. Some years later, I realized that Neal was perfectly correct.
It’s hard to imagine how the brains of those “anals” would keep on spouting some shit of the malodorous kind. Too gruesome and grotesque to imagine at the very least.
Those “anals” are no different from barbers or cab drivers. In fact, I prefer to listen to the opinions of my barber and friend, who gives me free massage, whenever I go to his shop for a haircut.
Neal got sickly for the last few years.
But Neal never wavered in his journalistic passion.
He is — I prefer the present tense — a great man.
