FRANCISCO S. TATAD
FRANCISCO S. TATAD

My last column on President Rodrigo Duterte (“Did DU30 visit Guangzhou’s Cancer Hospital?,” The Manila Times, Jan. 9, 2017) has created an unfortunate, unnecessary and completely silly media storm. There was not a single malicious, accusatory, pejorative or unfriendly line in that piece, but the mere fact that I raised the question, because of unavoidable circumstances, reportedly pissed off the President. The official reaction made it appear that just by raising it, I had committed some sort of lese majeste, or at the very least an act of “detraction,” a word misused by journalists, grammarians and editors, which actually means revealing someone’s private defects without a sufficiently just public motive.

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