The Climate We Wrote In
By 1977, Martial Law had been in force for nearly five years. The machinery of control was no longer new — prior review of student publications, the constant possibility that a critical sentence could cost a writer far more than a byline, and a general climate in which silence was the safer, expected posture. As Research Editor of The LaSallian that year, I inherited a publication operating inside that machinery, at a university weighing how far its students could go.
Writing for a campus paper under those conditions was never a neutral act. Every editorial decision — what to run, what to soften, what to leave out — was political. We were students first, but writing plainly about what we saw carried real consequences.
What a Research Editor Had to Do
The title carried specific duties, not just the general courage of putting a byline to something. A research editor had to verify every claim well enough that it could not be dismissed as agitation, because sloppy reporting made whole issues easier to shut down. Choices had to be made about how a story on land reform’s failures or a labor dispute was framed, sourced, and worded, so it survived institutional review without being emptied of the truth it was meant to carry. It meant protecting the peasants, workers, and urban poor who spoke to us, knowing what could happen to them if their names surfaced. And it meant a constant, private accounting between the responsibility to inform and the real chance that a published piece — or simply standing with the people writing it — could end in interrogation. There was no formal job description for any of this. It was worked out issue by issue, in decisions few outside the newsroom ever saw.
October 10, 1976: From the DLSU Gym to Mendiola
One memory from that period has stayed with me longer than any article I edited. On October 10, 1976, I joined a rally that assembled at the DLSU gym before marching toward Mendiola — a street that had already become, and would remain for years afterward, the place where Filipinos went to make their objections to the government visible.
That period also put my name on the public record in a more direct way: I was one of the signatories to the permit application for a rally meant to march from Plaza Miranda through Mendiola and on to the gates of Malacañang Palace itself. Afterward, the police went looking for the signatories, myself included. I was picked up and interrogated by the Metrocom and was released only through the intercession of the family of a fellow Lasallian editor. There was no ambiguity left about what dissent could cost.
I was not there as a reporter observing from a safe distance. I was there as a participant, and that distinction — between covering an issue and standing inside it — shaped how I thought about the responsibility of the student press for the rest of that year. You cannot honestly write about courage you have never had to summon yourself.
The Plaza Miranda Protest of October 10, 1976
On Sunday, October 10, 1976, more than 5,000 students, workers, and religious leaders marched from the De La Salle University campus to Plaza Miranda in Quiapo to protest a referendum called to extend and ratify Martial Law. Wire footage from the time described it as the first public gathering of that size at the historic plaza since Marcos had declared Martial Law four years earlier. After hours of speeches, a section of the crowd tried to push on toward Malacañang Palace; police blocked the route and, by evening, dispersed the crowd with truncheons, chasing demonstrators of all ages through the surrounding streets. An Associated Press newsreel of the dispersal survives in international archives, catalogued as “Rioting in Manila Over 4 Years of Martial Law,” and the clash was reported the next day by The New York Times, under the headline “Opponents of Martial Law Clash With Manila Police.” (Martial Law Museum Library; contemporary account)
This October 10 marks fifty years since that march from the DLSU gym to Plaza Miranda — a reminder of how recent this history still is, and how close it remains to the institution today’s editorial board now serves.
Writing About the Poor Under Threat
The harder daily test was not the rally but the newsroom, and the decision I kept returning to was a genuinely difficult one: how much of my academic standing, and the future it was supposed to secure, was I willing to put at risk for a story. Many campus journalists elsewhere were arrested for writing exactly what we were weighing — an account of land reform’s failures, a factory dispute, the gap between what Martial Law claimed to deliver and what it actually did to the people it claimed to help. That was not an abstract fear; it was the visible fate of writers not so different from us.
The LaSallian existed to ask those questions anyway. Every issue that named the peasants losing land, the workers losing the right to organize, or the urban poor absorbing the cost of a stability that was mostly rhetorical, meant weighing a diploma and a career against the responsibility of naming a reality that deserved to be named. There was no illusion that a byline in a university paper made you invisible to the people who enforced the restrictions. We did not always choose the riskier path — and knowing that is part of what I want today’s board to sit with.
What This Means for Today’s Editorial Board
The tools of control have changed. Today’s version of prior review is rarely a stamp on a printed page — it looks more like online harassment, strategic lawsuits, algorithmic burial, or simply the exhaustion of being drowned out by disinformation produced faster than any editorial board can fact-check it. The mechanism is different; the underlying test is not.
Three things from 1977 still hold. First, courage in student journalism is not recklessness — it is the willingness to write what is true about the people with the least power to protect themselves, done carefully enough that the writing survives scrutiny. Second, proximity matters: the strongest journalism I was part of came from writers who had stood somewhere near the story, not only summarized it from a desk. Third, an editorial board’s independence is never permanently won. It has to be exercised, deliberately, issue after issue, or it atrophies — a lesson as true against subtler modern pressures as it was against explicit Martial Law censorship.
What I would ask today’s editors and writers is simple: know whose story you are choosing not to tell, and be honest about why. In 1977, the honest answer was often fear. Fifty years on, I hope you have more room to choose better than we did — and that you use it.
Editor’s note: This is an unedited submission by a former editor of The LaSallian, reflecting on the responsibilities of being an Editorial Board member amid political instability. It also recounts their experiences reporting on political turmoil on the ground and witnessing massive demonstrations that will be remembered in history.
Professor Emmanuel Leyco is a management educator-practitioner with decades of teaching, consultancy, and senior executive experience in the private and public sectors. Prof. Leyco was the 10th University President and served as Vice Chairman of the Board of Regents of the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila. Prof. Leyco was a tenured professor at the Asian Institute of Management where he taught for about 25 years. Prof. Leyco was OIC Secretary (2017-2018) and Undersecretary (2016-2018) of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). He obtained his master’s degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Columbia University, and his bachelor’s degree from De La Salle University.