FIRING LINE: Wading in deep waters

FIRING LINE: Wading in deep waters

By Robert B. Roque Jr | September 1, 2026 

In recent days of flood coverage in Metro Manila and across nine provinces in Luzon, several live reporters were seen wading through floodwater, standing exposed to the water’s brown elements while delivering their reports amid habagat rains. Social media took notice, and so did I. As someone who taught journalism for many years at UST, I find myself thinking hard about what these images actually mean, and what they cost.

Having started my career covering the police beat, I have never doubted the value of a reporter who has lived the story before telling it. I remember a colleague who once dipped and swam in Manila Bay simply to understand, firsthand, the itch and dangers he was reporting on. That kind of immersion has its place. But immersion is not the same as endangerment, and I think TV news has reached a point where the two are too easily confused.

One concerned journalist put the question well online: are newsrooms, chasing a better shot or better ratings, now manufacturing danger instead of merely documenting it? I share that unease. In every newsroom I worked in, one rule was never spoken aloud because it did not need to be — no story is worth a journalist’s life. Safety comes before the shot. It is the message, not the medium, that audiences must focus on.

Today, that safeguard feels optional. Residents already post their own footage from inside the flood. TV crews already capture the water, the wreckage, the fear. The public already feels the danger through visuals and through the community’s own voices. Once that is achieved, sending a reporter into contaminated water adds spectacle, not truth.

I do not say this to judge the young reporters eager to prove themselves in their first deployments. It’s admirable that they have those instincts in the field. Nor do I judge a veteran anchor whose composure broke on air while reporting from a community in Bulacan that has been drowning for decades. Her reaction of seeming disgust was not unprofessional as some negative commenters perceive. It was honest, and honesty on camera deserves understanding, not mockery.

But I do have a question to ask to TV newsroom managers these days: Whatever happened to that unspoken rule in every newsroom I’ve known — that no story is worth a journalist’s life, that a reporter’s safety to report and file his or her story takes precedence over putting oneself in harm’s way just to get the shot, that every effort is about the story and never the story of the reporter risking it?

Should you not know when the story has already been told, and bring your reporters home unharmed to tell the next one? We need these passionate journalists working tomorrow, not recovering from what they waded into today. Preserve them. That is not weakness. That is the job done right.

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