The elephant's wife

In his column "Sleeping with the elephant" Cheking Seares gets all worked up about journalists getting too cozy with news sources.

No quarrel there. Though not always clear and distinct, the line must always remain there.

But towards the end of his column, Seares goes way out of line:

"A journalist sleeping with the news source confirms it when he later marries the news source or joins the news source's rah-rah band."

Since the only Cebu journalist in living memory to ever get married to a news source is my wife, who used to be his reporter, our little family felt particularly alluded to. And I barely stopped myself from demonstrating -- literally -- that Cheking Seares' house is just a "stone's throw away" from ours when we read the concluding paragraph:

"Guess what kind of stories he wrote about the elephant when he was still covering the circus."

Cheking, I know for a fact that your outfit conducted an audit of my wife's stories after we got married and found nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to suggest she was biased while she was covering her beat.

And at least my wife had the decency to quit her job, unlike some SunStar editors and reporters who remain on the payroll with their petty little agenda, and their favorite elephants they don't have the decency (or capacity) to marry. For almost 10 years she was one of your best reporters: she was intelligent, she wrote well, she was never on the take, and she had integrity. Which is more than one can say about some of those who still haven't quit.

Finally: You can pick on my sister, or on me, but don't pick on my wife. We can take your punches, but don't make this marriage a punchline in your otherwise boring column. It's ungentlemanly and tasteless.