Jose Carillo's Comment on Reporting of Typhoon Ondoy

Understandably, major natural disasters like Typhoon Ondoy's killer floods take their toll in flawed grammar and syntax if not outright cockeyed news reporting. This was evident in the flood-disaster reporting of one of the major Metro Manila broadsheets, where a misplaced modifier reared its ugly head—to use an ugly cliché—right on its front-page headline story, followed by the paper's imprudent if not impudent decision to directly quote a high-ranking government official mangling his English while making a major announcement. It's really in the worst of times like this that reporters and editors could be a little more understanding of other people's flawed English and a little more compassionate in their reporting, but sadly, the propensity of some of them to put the country's high officials down appears to seethe unabated come hell or high water.