People are dying. And we’ve learned to scroll past it.
We rewired DAILY TRIBUNE’s social media because this is the only front page most Filipinos will ever see: a screen where headlines vanish in two seconds unless they hurt.
So we made them hurt.
The front page no longer lands on paper. It flickers past in a feed, where stories survive only if they shout.
What fades isn’t false, only insufficiently urgent.
Still, people die. Less from catastrophe than from calibrated neglect, where delay is policy and inaction is intent.
Every death draws a line, and together they form the outline of a nation designed to vanish the people it fails.
We’ve evolved to expose that design: The quiet, paper-cut violence that kills without ever pulling the trigger.
And yet the news became polite. Neutered. Toothless. Designed to report suffering without ever sounding like it. Flooded with data and starved of moral urgency.
We mistook transcripts for reporting. Balance for justice. We quote the powerful instead of questioning them. Somewhere along the way, we protected institutions more than we protected lives.
Traditional journalism still clings to the myth of objectivity like shield. As if not feeling anything is the highest ethical stance. But in a country where the ground itself favors the rich, neutrality is complicity.
For 25 years, DAILY TRIBUNE has covered coup attempts and coverups, blackouts, blacklists. We reported from the ground when it wasn’t safe, and held the line when others folded into flattery.
We write from the ground because that’s where the bodies fall. They call it sensational. We call it specific.
The sitio reached by tarpaulins but never by roads. The school on the other side of the river. The salary that stayed the same no matter how far they walked, how deep they waded.
That’s not bias. That’s accountability.
This is journalism that indicts. That names names. That holds power in a stranglehold of facts and grief. It’s what journalism was supposed to be before it got scared.
Muzzle the press that screams for the dead, and the only ones comforted are those who buried them.
If that makes us sound emotional, then maybe the better question is: Where is your emotion?
Where is your horror that a child died because epinephrine is not available? Where is your disgust that a billion-peso budget cleared faster than an ambulance?
Where is your shame, that a child can die from bureaucracy, and no one even resigns?
Because when the next story is filed with caution instead of truth, remember the silence of the dead was bought with your comfort.
What kind of country lets the poor die quietly, and gets angry at the people who said it out loud?