Inhumanity

ELIAS Manlangit, 52, must have summoned every ounce of his fatherly instinct and strength to save his live-in partner, Manuela Palatan, 52, and kid, Kenneth Palatan, 15, from the evil flames. As their skin crackled like popcorn and their faces melted, the victims held hands and probably screamed to God to quickly end their most painful death.

- Renato Gomba Quilicol, People's Tonight

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Had Renato been in one of our workshops in school last year, my first criticism would be directed at his wrong choice of words to describe how those people burned. First, I could not imagine the human skin crackling like popcorns after being exposed to intense heat. Instead, I would describe their fiery deaths as "their body fats bubbling and bursting while their rubbery skin roasted like a pig from the heat." The description would have been more animated for a lead statement.

Second, I do not believe that they screamed to God to hasten their most painful death. Instead, they would have begged the Almighty for mercy and spare them from their most gruesome suffering. It is a human instinct to wish to live.

But this entry is not about these literary criticisms. It is about what I saw in the front page of People's Tonight this afternoon that made me think of how appalling their newspaper has become.

Given that the byliner never attended a Creative Writing Workshop before, I think that his opening statement about the Tondo fire was suffice to stir the reader's imagination of the events that took place. However, what I found most disturbing was the captioned photo also shown in the front page with the news.

Imagine a photo of a gutted house in the background: charred wood and corrugated roof were all over the place. At the center of the picture was a fireman dressed in bright yellow coat. He was pointing at a creature that was beyond recognition lying over the ashed remains of a narrow alley pavement. The creature's mangled flesh and bones suggested that it was once a human being, but I saw it more as a roasted calf with its salmon-pink ribs exposed to the elements. However, the sight of its ebony-white skull without any traces of flesh and hair revealed that the creature was indeed human - disfigured by the flames that brought unspeakable tragedy to its victims.

I understand that tabloids need to shock its readers with sensationalized news and gruesome photos in order to catch the reader's attention. When I was a kid, I once saw this photo of a girl that was run over by a train. Her guts spilled over the rail tracks and for weeks I had nightmares because of that photo. In the case of the roasted person I described above, the picture resulted to a sudden loss of appetite and an unscheduled visit to Santa Clara. The image was just so depressing that I had to strengthen my will and believe that there is something to look forward in life.

You see, what I believe the photo had violated was the dignity of a person. I remember once, my dad was fighting for his life in some public hospital in the city. We used to own a tabloid and one of the photographers thought that it would be good to take his pictures - with all the tubes inserted in his body to show everyone how he fought for life. I ordered the photographer out of the ICU because I believe that his suffering ought to be a private matter. The public can never feast their eyes at the sight of a dying lion.

The tragedy of the victims from the recent fire was enough to stir emotions of sorrow and grief from those who read the story. However, the tasteless image of a body burned to death leaves a sense of fascination and wonder similar to what we have felt as a child, when we saw these freak shows in the karnabal of our youth.

I don't know if the reporter or the photographer still valued human dignity when they took the photos of the charred remains of the victim. I do not know if the news editor was trying to prove something when he chose the photos with the corresponding story as their news banner for today's issue. However, I do know that I'd never let any of my loved ones receive that kind of exposure.

Our journalism professor once invoked us to be human enough in order to write our stories with emotion so that it would catch our reader's attention. In this case, maybe it was People's Tonight's inhumanity that took over, for them to release such very disappointing front page photo and shocked the nation with their relentless greed for attention.