Editor’s note: The author is president of the nonprofit Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos (Ercof), and plays the bass guitar and keyboards.

AMONG my peers, there seems to be a common observation in the reporting of any kind of news that media generally shows bias for sensational stories that whet the reading public’s appetite for such accounts but which incidentally also sells newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids. News reportage on Filipino migrants is no exception.

IT WAS a humid afternoon six years ago when three men sipped coffee and conspired against Philippine journalism.

“It’s a crazy idea but it could work,” one of the men, a reporter for The Manila Times then, said.

THERE wasn’t a “Keep silent” sign inside the interview room, but you could hear a pin drop inside the Belgian Embassy in Makati City.

Everyone lining up for a Schengen visa could hear a whisper, even of those getting interviewed.

FOUR graduates of the Maritime Academy of the Asia and the Pacific are at greater risk than their classmates because they are women.

University of the Philippines professor Lucia Palpal-latoc Tangi came to this conclusion after in-depth interviews with a dozen women seafarers, most of who are working as bar waitresses, utility, and massage therapists on passenger and cruise liners.

Reporting from Tours and Paris, France and from Binangonan, Rizal Province, Philippines

IN TOURS, France, they buried the fountain of youth.

In this garden city south of Paris is where a quarter of a million people speak the country’s purest French. Visibly, the elderly walk slowly through.