Volume 5, Issue No. 1
OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /
Our latest as of Wednesday, July 5, 2023
~ This month marks the fifth year of this blog. Back then, the paper I was writing for averred having the most number of readers mainly because of a huge following trailing my articles. Now, the calm and pleasurable moment of my own reading was interrupted while browsing through the newspaper article by a favorite writer. An innocuous-looking piece, published in March, stared me in the face and when I began to go over it, I found it was like an old-wives' tale by somebody who sounded like he was a paid hack. My Fourth of July holiday mood was gone. I wasn't inclined to let this dude and his principal get away with it. I had to set the record straight.
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WHO IS THIS GUY? A PAID HACK? A SCAMMER?
Spinning Misconception Into An Attack
Balita's Needless Indulgence Shows Its Decline
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life". - Winston Churchill
TORONTO - An unrecognized commenter found his attack piece on me on the murky page of Toronto's favorite fish wrapper, the Balita tabloid, apparently to cheer up its dejected editor in name only (EINO, pronounced eye-no), Teresita Abesamis de Juan Cusipag alias Tess Cusipag.
I happened to see it just this week while reading the column of my favorite "baby", the walking encyclopedia named Baby K. Jimenez or BKJ, one of the very few writers who enlivens the publication with her enlightening and entertaining articles on Philippine moviedom and the many talents that populate it.
As a professional policy, I take any criticism with an open mind but when it skirts the issue and becomes personal, my gut reaction is to hurl back the venom and hit as hard if not harder.
I'm particularly incensed by the lack of understanding by a certain Dan de Castro of the underlying reasons why the EINO has repeatedly verbalized her nearly one-million-dollar misery in so many words and dragged me to her financial debacle.
This commenter could have sought my reaction before even attempting to write. And here, after reading my rebuttal, he might change his viewpoint and even praise me for educating him. Take a look dude: https://filwebchannelmagazine.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-lies-and-fantastic-tales-of-eino.html).
Who the fuck are you, Dan de Castro? Are you a paid hack, a scammer, a newly-recruited attack dog? Are you a Facebook fan of the EINO, or an ass-kissing supporter of everything that's wrong in the Filipino community, or an advocate of whatever goes?
Reading me, according to him, was a "misfortune of wasting time" as if his time was that important to mankind. He failed to realize that I was doing him a favor by opening his narrow and uneducated mind to the sad realities in the Filipino community, among them the exploitation by the EINO.
By the way, I recently uncovered the same kind of exploitation by another tabloid. (Full stories here:
He called my stories "hurticles" where, he said, "gutter-language was the norm". Those words and phrases identify him as another crybaby, a bleeding heart - one of the most common segments of the community who whines and grumbles whenever called out for their wrongdoing.
He's grossly ill-informed, his vocabulary tells me. His reading material is probably limited to Balita, the periodical that guarantees stunting one's way of thinking and expanding one's idiosyncrasies.
The commenter seems to have no knowledge of investigative journalism which, by its nature, wounds the offender and exposes him to public censure. That's where it hurts.
He's probably fond of Balita's practice of putting lipstick on a pig in its treatment of press releases. That is called garbage. That is not journalism. Well, what do you expect of somebody passing herself off as a media pundit?
I can see that the EINO was just too willing to give space to de Castro's bluster and deny me the same. She's happy, I think, that she found an ignorant fucker trying to eviscerate me to give her a boost in her inevitable descent into decline. (Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NGQX-SucJ4).
She had to publish his comments to show her paper still enjoys some patronage, though mostly from people who still think the earth is flat and that Little Manila is the entire Canada.
De Castro claimed he was, and I quote him, "glad to learn that Marquez' poison pen has been stopped". Well, dude, the ink in my pen has not run out. And, who'd dare stop me?
The EINO, and for that matter anyone, has no power over me - either to control what I write, or to say what I want to say. Many a poison pen are the stuff of Balita, especially that one held by EINO in feeding a legion of gossip-mongers on Facebook.
Since I was supposedly "stopped", I focused on my blog and social media channels on YouTube. Sure enough, my readers (a few hundreds while I was in Balita) and now numbering in the hundreds of thousands - an experience I never had in that paper. My YouTube channels had raked in millions of views, as a matter of fact.
Balita is nowhere near my numbers. Its circulated copies range from a low 5,000 copies to a high of 10- to a claimed15,000 copies. Assuming it's read by a family of five, which is unlikely, its readership amounts to a high of 75,000, a trickle by any measure.
The only consolation I got there was in being introduced to different varieties of scammers and to the degree of scamming they engaged in to hoodwink unsuspecting people. Ever heard of elite scammers? Coincidentally, their patron is the faux Santa Teresita de Little Manila. (Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved).
I suggest that Filipinos in this adopted country must be united not to hurt each other by media publicity. ”Owe no one but love one another.” Not destroying each other. I felt your hurt but i know your are being tested and when you survived you become stronger in faith. God bless you. - Atty. Dante P. Mercado, Toronto
ReplyDeleteThis is a powerfully written article, as well as entertaining! I don't know what the commenter said, but I see you're very upset and angry with the writer. You definitely have a great facility with vocabulary and the written word! I especially liked your paragraph #3 and how you worded it. Very hard-hitting and to the point! Thanks. - Susan Young, Toronto
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteCheers! - BKJ