On bread, butter, and the myth of the envelope

THERE is a pervasive, cynical whisper that floats around political circles — and sadly, sometimes echoes even within our own ranks.

It goes something like this: these politicians wonder if media practitioners could even eat regularly if they didn’t receive anything from them.

It’s a statement dressed up as a noble critique of corruption, but let’s be real: it serves as a lazy, blanket insult to a profession and a convenient erasure of actual hard work.

This is disconcerting. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the news media community actually is.

We are not a monolith.

We aren’t a hive mind where every worker drone operates on the same frequency of compromise.

We are a motley crew of workers with divergent beliefs, various political colors, and different economic realities.

To assume that a journalist cannot feed their family without the patronage of a politician is to assume that journalism itself has zero market value. It ignores the reality of honest-to-goodness hard work.

This editorial cartoon was created by Gemini Pro.

In my 28 years in this community — 10 of which were spent grinding as a freelance correspondent for international news wires — I have a newsflash for the cynics: Nakapakaon pud baya ko sa akong banay gikan sa akong hinaguan.

International wire work is not for the faint of heart. It is paid in sweat, strict deadlines, and blood pressure spikes. It does not pay in favors; it pays in output. And believe it or not, that output puts food on the table.

More importantly, it paid for tuition. To date, I have sent my children through school on this income alone. I have seen them graduate, one by one. Isa na lang kulang.

That is the ultimate receipt.

When you raise a family on honest money, the food tastes different. It tastes like dignity — with a side of clear conscience.

To suggest that we need a politician’s “blessing” just to survive is to discount the thousands of column inches written, the photos filed, and the deadlines met by honest workers in this industry.

We are not all the same. And for those of us who have ground it out for decades, we don’t need the handout. We have the receipt.

The news media has a social contract with the citizens of the republic. Our role is to hold the powerful to account. That is why we are called the Fourth Estate — we are the check and balance to the other three.

Here’s a wild idea for the onion-skinned politicos: How about you do your job, and we’ll stick to ours?