It was drilled into generations of journalists that no story is worth your life. Tell the story. Do not become the story.
Yet as leptospirosis cases make headlines and heavy rains turn streets into dangerous flood zones, some television reports raise an uncomfortable question. Are newsrooms asking reporters to take risks that add more drama to the footage than value to the story?
There is lightning. There is waist-deep, muddy floodwater. And there is a reporter standing in it, delivering a live report.
The picture may be compelling television. That does not make the risk defensible.
Journalism should document danger, not require journalists to physically enter it for dramatic effect. A flooded street does not become more newsworthy because a reporter is standing in the water.
The recent PEP.ph account of GMA-7 reporter Oscar Oida deserves serious attention in newsroom discussions. Oida recalled his 10-day battle with leptospirosis after exposure to floodwater in 2022. His experience offers a lesson that should require no further explanation. If the danger can be shown without putting the reporter in it, why put the reporter in it?
Oida himself has questioned the practice of wading into floods simply to demonstrate what viewers can already see. The flood is there. The danger is obvious. The reporter need not serve as the demonstration.
That makes the familiar sign-off, “Ingat, bawal magkasakit,” particularly jarring when the assignment itself may have exposed the reporter to unnecessary danger.
This is where in loco parentis, or acting in the place of a parent, offers a useful principle. Newsrooms may not literally be parents to their journalists, but editors and producers have a duty of care toward the people they send into the field.
That duty begins before the live report. Ask whether the shot adds information or merely adds exposure. Set clear safety rules. Provide proper equipment. Find safer vantage points. Make it clear that a dramatic frame is never more important than the person inside it.
The Eddie Garcia Law, or Republic Act No. 11996, is a useful warning about what happens when workplace safety cannot be left to good intentions. The law, approved in 2025, requires protections for workers in the movie and television industry, including safeguards against hazardous working conditions.
Newsrooms should take the lesson before another tragedy teaches it for them. Protecting reporters should not require a law, a lawsuit, or a memorial. It should require judgment.
Let us not wait for Department of Labor and Employment or Congress to impose standards after another preventable tragedy. The industry should have the judgment to protect its own people before the law has to remind it why that responsibility exists.
