TRANSCRIPT: CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper Responds about Korina Sanchez Comment in Typhoon in Haiyan, Pilipinas

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE 
IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.



Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHjOrpUz4fQ

If you have been watching our coverage over the past week , you'd know that we have been in Tacloban and elsewhere trying to be as accurate as possible. Accuracy is what we care most about here at CNN and giving information that might help people on the ground and help the relief effort in some way become more efficient. In our reporting, it seems out here in the Philippines, it has become something like t a  political issue here at times. A broadcaster, a radio broadcaster named Korina Sanchez has greatly taken an issue about some of my reporting. She also is not just a radio broadcaster, she also happens to be the wife of the Interior Minister who is overseeing the relief effort on the ground. But Sanchez seems to be in the mistaken impression that I said I saw no presence of Philippine government on the ground in Tacloban, I never said that. Obviously I've been on the ground in Tacloban for days.  I've in fact interviewed a very heroic Philippine Navy captain Santiago who has been going out and helping people. I've seen the work that is being done and the work that isn't being done even as importantly. Ms. Sanchez is welcomed to go there and I would urge her to go there. I don't know if she has but her husband is the Interior Minister, I am sure she could arrange a flight. Here's the broadcast of what she thinks I said something that I didn't say in: 

As for who exactly is in-charge of the Philippines side of this operation, that is not really clear. I am just surprised that I haven't , I haven't... I expected that in this day 5, I thought that I have gotten here very late that things will be well in hand. It doesn't seem like that. People are desperate. People do not have any place for shelter. It is very difficult for people to get food.Neighbors are helping out neighbors. Water is in short supply. It is a very very bad situation here. 

Let's  remember, I showed  you a clinic several days ago. It was at the airport. The doctors there said they didn't have enough food, they didn't have enough water for the hundreds of people they are seeing everyday and they didn't have enough medical supplies. That's a clinic at the airport. If any clinic in the entire disaster zone should receive aid quickly and easily, it should be the clinic at the airport and they were not getting it. I don't know what's the situation there today. I certainly pray to God that it is in a better situation than it was even 2 days ago. 

The President of the Philippines has also counseled foreign journalist that they should be accurate in their reports. We certainly appreciate that counsel. Accuracy is what we strive for. I read in the paper today, its the first time that I have been able to read the news- The President also said in his speech that 'the media should use a role to uplift the spirits of the Filipino people to find stories of resilience of hope and faith and show the world how strong the Filipino people are.'

I would actually say,  that all week-long, in every report we have done - We have shown how strong the Filipino people are. The people of Tacloban, and Samar, and Cebu and all of these places, where so many have died. They are strong not to have survived this storm but they are strong to have survived the aftermath of this storm. They have survived for a week now often with very little food, with very little water, with very little medical attention. Can you imagine the strength it takes to be living in a shack, to be living and sleeping in the streets next to the body of your dead children? Can you imagine that strength? I can't. And I've seen that strength day-in and day-out here in the Philippines. And we honor them with every broadcast that we do.  

Direk Peque Gallaga's Open Letter to President BS Aquino

Not since Marcos have we as a people been so polarized. As far as our hearts and minds are concerned it’s like we’re in the edge of a civil war. We are forced to take a hard look at ourselves and what we value.

Because of this, we are fighting friends in coffee houses, on the telephone, and on Facebook. We are a people whose lives have been upended. We don’t know what to do to get things done right and right away. We lash out. We insult our leaders trying to get them to do a lot more than to pose for photo ops – of giving out relief goods on a one-by-one basis. We cry desperately for demonstrable government response – we get almost next to nothing.

It is increasingly apparent that local media goes hand in hand with self-servicing Malacañang press releases which are more concerned with their showbiz image than confronting, accepting and dealing with the problem. What our leaders tell us is contradicted by the reports from international commentators who are understandably more objective and growing less dispassionate as they witness the horrors around them.

What our leaders tell us is also contradicted by the victims in these areas who are slowly able to give us the true picture of the realities of the situation. And the reality is that people are starving. The dead still lie on the streets even five days after the event. There are anguished souls scavenging for whatever they can to survive, as well as professional looters ambushing the helpless and relief caravans. It’s a war zone out there.

This disaster has affected, not only the islands in the path of Yolanda, but all of us as a nation. We have all been judged and found wanting. But more worrisome, is that we take a long hard look at our leaders and we judge and we find them wanting. It is worrisome because we have chosen them and are paying them to serve the needs of our nation and it seems that they can’t deliver. I don’t think that anybody, even the most criminal politician, can be that hard-hearted and close his eyes to this calamity so I can only surmise that they don’t know what to do. That they are impotent and incompetent. I am 70 years old and I don’t know what to do, but then again, I didn’t run for office promising the voters that I would take care of national concerns.

I am a private citizen and like most of my fellow citizens, have given of what I have to the relief effort. I have given to the point of hurting. I am 70 years old and have been stupid a lot of times for seven decades. I want to think that I can be a little less stupid now. This time, I want to make sure that my hard-earned money will reach its intended goal. I am sick and tired of throwing away my money; of making our politicians wealthy because of my unconcern and my inattention. I am sick and tired of my stupidity.

So I very much care now where all this help is going. I read Marvin Xanth Geronimo who was there when Yolanda struck: that TV personalities and politicians like Mar Roxas and Ted Failon going to Tacloban for the photo op. They never helped; endless tracking video shots of flattened towns with people walking clutching a plastic bottle of water with no government presence whatsoever; Korina Sanchez calling Anderson Cooper “misinformed”. Cooper was in Tacloban. Korina was not; the US landing 5 planes full of goods and not allowing any politicians to touch any of it. How much more do we need for us to realize that the enemy was not Yolanda? Yolanda was just a force of nature. The enemy is our leaders. And the leader of our leaders is the President.

So what now? There’s nothing I can actually do. I can only rage, rage against the dying of common decency. I can only rage against this man who claimed in a Christian Amanpour interview that he couldn’t get to the disaster areas because the weather after the storm left didn’t permit him to fly. This is 24 hours after the sun was shining all over the Philippines by then. I can only rage against a man who made light of the tragedy, refusing to identify it as a major disaster; who made light of a victim of looting who was shot at by telling him, “But you did not die, right?” I rage against a man who continually blames the LGU’s on the ground for their incompetence and their inefficiency because it is beginning to dawn on me that these Visayan LGU’s happen to be Romualdez people and this man is playing politics with people’s lives.

This is a crime. What this man does is unconscionable. I can only state it here. I can do nothing about it for now. I will wait for whatever movement develops after this fiasco and I will join it. But for now, what I can do is to declare that I am deeply offended by the people who try to stop me and others from stating the obvious.

All those people who charge us for criticizing, for being negative, for Aquino bashing – I am done with these people. In a very Yellow Army way, they try to hide behind an illogical argument that we cannot help if we criticize. I don’t know how good these friends are at multi-tasking, but one does not cancel out the other. We can help and we can criticize. And at this point I am convinced that we do help when we criticize; if at one point we can, as Hamlet says, “catch the conscience of the king”. But I know that this is futile. This man is no king. He is not even a real representative. What can you expect from someone who never worked an honest day in his life. What could he possibly relate to?

So my friends who accuse me of Aquino bashing: I want you to know that I’m done with your line of thinking. Either you defend this man or you defend the people that this man is ignoring. Don’t believe that the people are his “boss”. This was a piece of advertising sound byte created by showbiz experts to get the unthinking masses out there to swallow this uniquely unqualified man. This man who is totally unprepared for the most difficult job in the country. So my friends, as far as I’m concerned, you choose him or you choose the people. But if you instruct me again to stop bashing this man I am unfriending you. I will unfriend you in Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, and out in our leaderless streets. —Peque Gallaga

Si Peque Gallaga ang direktor ng mga sumusunod na critically-acclaimed films: Oro, Plata, Mata (1982), Scorpio Nights (1985), Unfaithful Wife (1986), Once Upon A Time (1986), at Isang Araw Walang Diyos (1989).

Alone with my Thoughts

Criticism may not be agreeable but it is necessary. It is like check-and-balance. I believe people complain not because they want to make matters worse, but because they too are frustrated that people who are supposed to get help by now are not getting it as expected. They may not have realized it yet, perhaps they will realize it later that it did so little to complain. But i do think that a vast majority of these people who are complaining are doing their part as well. Filipinos are good at multi-tasking, we help and we can  complain at the same time. I also believe that these people are not the misinformed ones and that their rage sprouted from an overload of information and helplessness of our fellow men broadcasted by the local and international media, more particularly in the social media. 


At the end of the day, we all want what is best for our people. Wherever we are in the world, Filipinos or non-Filipinos, we share that compassion to help each other in grave times like these. This not a battle of those who complain or those who do not. It is enough that we show no indifference in this challenge we are in. This too shall pass. It will take time to rebuild our nation but it will most definitely sharpen us. 

"He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help" - Abraham Lincoln

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" -Edmund Burke-