Death on the Night Shift in the Filipino Trump's Manila
MANILA — Only five people had turned up dead. It was a slow evening.
The journalists on the night shift say Fridays are like that. A predictable rhythm has developed to the killings in this dense metropolis of nearly 13 million. Weekdays are busier, often producing a dozen bodies before morning. One reporter told me the record was 27 one night. Weekends are more tranquil, which is when those who cover this beat attend wakes and funerals of victims, or follow up with witnesses and other sources.
In the eight months of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, reports on the drug war have caused concern around the world and in the Philippines, though the president’s supporters cast the news as biased and the killings as necessary.
Alarmed by the daily death tolls and tales of systemic abuse, I spent a weekend on the front lines with some of the journalists who track the mass death.
The media can hardly keep up. “The night shift used to be boring,” one reporter told me outside the press office of a police precinct. “Fires and domestic abuse and car accidents,” he said. Now their stories on daily deaths, crooked cops and the exploitations of the powerful no longer shock.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/opinion/death-on-the-night-shift-in-dutertes-manila.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region
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