During a press briefing yesterday, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque criticized a report published by news agency Reuters, calling it “bad journalism” while admitting that he had not read the story.
“I did not meet the ultimatum, and therefore, I would not comment on the story because that’s bad journalism,” Roque said about a story published on Tuesday about a group of police officers from Davao, where President Rodrigo Duterte is from, and how they “racked up kills” in the drug war.
The “Davao Boys” led most of the anti-drug operations in Quezon City Police District Station 6. Officers from this district station allegedly killed 108 people in anti-drug operations from July 2016 to June 2017, Reuters reported.
But Roque said yesterday that the administration was not given enough time to respond to the allegations raised in the story.
“That’s bad journalism. She went ahead and published it without my statement and how dare anyone give anyone a deadline to respond,” he said.
However, Reuters denied this in a statement and said that they gave them ample time to share their side of the story.
“The claim that Reuters gave the president’s office just an hour to respond is untrue. Reuters sent questions to the president’s office a week before the story was published and the president’s office confirmed it had received them,” the statement reads.
“Reuters followed that up with phone calls and emails, but the president’s office never responded to our questions,” it also says.
In another statement released yesterday, Philippines Communications Assistant Secretary Queenie Dizon acknowledged that the news agency contacted them last week but said that she was busy attending to the needs of the typhoon-stricken province Biliran.
“I strongly denounce Reuters’ claim that the ‘president’s office never responded to our questions’ as untrue in so many levels,” the statement reads.
“The writer of the article, Clare Baldwin, called me on December 18, Monday night, and I wasn’t able to answer/saw a missed call since I was in Biliran…in the middle of the sea, carried by a small boat on the way back to Tacloban. Is Ms. Baldwin’s story more important while I was in Ground Zero of Typhoon Urduja?” she said.
Baldwin, an award-winning journalist is credited as the writer of the articles together with Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew R.C. Marshall.
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