"Behind every good writer is a good editor. The anonymous mind that cuts and buttresses, and reorders stories, otherwise ponderous or bland or tortured, so that the reader may be better served…"

So goes the Citation of Merit by the Philippine Press Council's Editor's Choice Award given to Business World publisher-editor Raul L. Locsin at the culmination of the Second Editors and reporters Forum on August 13-14 at the Century park Hotel.

Locsin sees profitability as a guarantee that his paper will be able to maintain its integrity and credibility. "I do not believe in subsidies. Any newspaper that does not make money has to be subsidized and owes its loyalty to the interests that subsidize it and, therefore, cannot truthfully and fairly serve the public interest," he said. Business World has demonstrated that a credible newspaper can establish a viable readership, which will attract enough advertisers to ensure its profitability that will, in turn, guarantee the paper's integrity.

The press in democratic societies, he said, is not part of government but serves as a check and balance against those that the citizens have voted into power.

He discussed Joseph Estrada's move to close a newspaper critical of the administration as a threat to press freedom. In his paper presented to the RMAF, Locsin said that eternal vigilance is still the price to prevent another "Marcos" regime. That lack of vigilance deluded us as a nation into thinking that a temporary surrender of our civil rights, among them the freedom of the press, was essential to the myth of national interest that would-be dictators use as a lure to the citizen."

"We endanger our freedom whenever we loosely sacrifice accuracy, and ethics, by using our deadline imperatives as the excuse. We become grossly amiss in our duties whenever we relax our vigilance against laws or regulations that diminish the income of our community media." The case he pointed out was the official ban on political advertisements which strangles provincial newspapers of such income during election campaign months. While some legislators are now talking of the need to lift the ban, some Senators appear to be determined to make it stick.