was) was Malay came on like a stereotype—a newsman with the obligatory hard-boiled stance. (Others recall that he sported a trim bow tie to complete the look.) Yet could there have been any question as to his bona fides? He became editor in chief of UP’s Philippine Collegian in an era of rigor and excellence. In the real world, he did not become a news deskman only by dint of a facility in an acquired language; he earned his spurs pounding the beat with the rest and best of them. As a columnist, he inveighed against officialdom. He certainly could not be tagged with the dictum “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Even his birthplace, Gagalangin in plebeian Tondo, holy ground that has produced such patriots as Amado Hernandez and Atang de la Rama, had a cachet that seemed to give him leeway to perorate on the profession of journalism, the nitty-gritty and particularly the ethics of it (meeting with a politician, “you paid for your own coffee,” he once told an interviewer), and the responsibility attendant to it (“...[W]here the issue is one of right and wrong, there can be no choice,” he once wrote. “Righteousness of a cause, or its lack, is the only consideration taken into account when we sit down to write....”). He gave the lie to the notion that radical thought is only for the young. In that sense, he was even more vigorous than many of the so-called angry young men.
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