After his ASEAN trip in Laos and a side trip to Indonesia, President Rodrigo Duterte assured reporters on his arrival in Davao City on Saturday (September 10) that he was not angry at them.
“I am not at liberty to be angry at anybody. It is your sworn duty to ask questions…Wala akong galit sa inyo (I do not have a grudge on you),” President Duterte said. This came after he was wrongly quoted by some media reporters to have cursed and threatened US President Barack Obama on the drug-related extra-judicial killings in the country. The US president allegedly backed down on a bilateral meeting with Duterte in the ASEAN meet because of this.
Duterte had also clarified that he never directed any insulting statement personally at anyone, much less the US president. His camp later confirmed this, adding how the president had regretted that his words were misconstrued as a personal attack.
But as for the Philippine media, the president encouraged them to criticize him objectively. “Do not hesitate to attack or criticize me if I do wrong in my job. It is your duty,” Duterte said at the media briefing on his arrival. The president and his team had just come in via the Davao International Airport after a five-day trip abroad.
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He stressed that he was not even mad at them about the incident between him and Obama in the just-concluded ASEAN Summit held in Vientiane, Laos. The Philippine media came under fire when some reporters misquoted him on his reply after being asked what he’d do if Obama would ask him about the extrajudicial killings in the country.
President Duterte had injected some invectives into his reply but later claimed it was not directed at anyone.
Specifically, the president was quoted out of context when broadcaster Ed Lingao read a news item on the air how Duterte supposedly referred to Obama as “son of a whore” before leaving Manila for the Summit. However, Lingao publicly apologized to the president after realizing his blunder. The president readily accepted the apology, seeing the error was not done with malice.
The president claimed he perfectly understood the job of a journalist and the vital function of media in society. “The media has an important role in recording the history of the country,” Duterte said.
However, the president decried how some people and some sectors of media tended to misquote him and put him in a bad light. Often, they took his words contrary to what he really meant, or else came out with an utterly different story.
Sources: (philstar.com, rappler.com)
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