~~ The editor of the widely-circulated Philippine News got the boot on Saturday after he insisted on running a story about one of the paper's top advertisers. Was that a blow on press freedom in America? Or, is it "poetic justice?"

By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ

SAN DIEGO - The editor of the San Francisco-based Philippine News has been fired by the newspaper's president over a story that had been ordered "killed" and which he had defiantly published and refused to discard.

Lito Gutierrez, who had been at the helm of the paper for the past five years, confirmed that he had been let go effective immediately (which was Saturday, June 23) right after he received his termination notice.

The 55-year-old journalist was apparently not quite surprised by the dismissal inasmuch as his relations with the paper's management had not been exactly pleasant given, in his own words, "the propensity of Philippine News’s management to suck up to advertisers at the expense of serious, honest journalism."

Bobby Reyes, a community activist and media blogger based in Los Angeles, promptly mocked the removal, saying it did not signal the "death of Fil-Am press freedom" as had been initially called in web postings but "poetic justice".

"It is just a case of Mr. Gutierrez' receiving his own dose of medicine," Reyes said, citing instances when Gutierrez refused to publish letters and commentaries that contradicted columnists of the paper, including articles highlighting the alleged monetary scandals involving the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA).

"What happened to Mr. Gutierrez is just the dramatization of 'poetic justice'," Reyes added.

Gutierrez explained that the management of the Philippine News had disrespected him by ordering a reporter to hold a story without as much as discussing it with the editor-in-chief (him) as was the standard protocol in newsrooms.

"Well, that line was crossed last week," Gutierrez said. "For sensitive matters like this, management would discuss it with the editor x x x. I was not even accorded this basic respect," he explained.

That story involved San Francisco businessman Carlos Araneta who, Gutierrez said, had been ordered by a court to pay $25 million to his partners who had accused him of depleting assets of their partnership in an unnamed bank.

Araneta also happened to be the head of the cargo and money remittance firm LBC, which is a major advertiser of Philippine News.

Gutierrez seemed to suggest that Araneta had a hand in the order to kill the offending story by saying that his other company (LBC) advertises in the paper. That also implied that management of Philippine News had succumbed to pressure.

"The management of Philippine News must have forgotten that we are not in some banana republic, that we are in the United States of America where freedom of the press is a fundamental right," explained Gutierrez.

He said it wasn't the first time that he had been ordered to kill a story. Previously, he had also been told not to use any story about another businessman, Rene Medina, owner of a gaming facility called Lucky Chances in Colma, California.

Medina, according to Gutierrez, had been charged by the Internal Revenue Service with failing to pay taxes.

Gutierrez said he avoided a confrontation with Philippine News president Francis Espiritu and went on with the story and published it after Loida Nicolas-Lewis, the then president of NaFFAA "issued a statement in support of Medina, saying that the IRS case was politically motivated".

Espiritu had not responded to questions up to the time this story was being written. # # #