The 1959 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

RESPONSE of Tarzie Vittachi

I am very deeply conscious of the honor and privilege of having been selected to receive one of the Awards commemorating the life work of one of the most dedicated and well-beloved statesmen of the 20th century. I accept this recognition with due awareness of the distinction it confers upon me, leavened by my consciousness of my own shortcomings in the profession in which I belong.

The response within me to the honor you have bestowed upon me is not one of satisfaction that something has been achieved, nor that some talent and skill I may have shown as a newspaperman and writer has been adequately rewarded, but one of humility and awe at the dimensions of the responsibility it implies for the future. It means to me that whatever I do as a journalist and writer in the future, whatever the mistakes I may have made in the past, will have to reflect, in such measure as I am capable of, that vitality, reliability and inspired leadership that Ramon Magsaysay symbolized in his life. The life of a journalist is not the romantic crusade that the script writers have made it out to be. The life of a journalist who comments on political affairs—as I do—is particularly perilous. But these perils are not usually of the kind that make heroes out of cub reporters or elevate painstaking and studious columnists and editors into glamorous buccaneers ready to draw their pens from their scabbards at the drop of a ballot. A journalist—a good one—might win a hundred readers overnight and lose two friends. He may lose the hundred readers a week later but he may never win back his friends. But there are greater perils than this—and much nearer home. A newspaperman can lose his sense of proportion and perspective under the weight of political pressure or he can sacrifice forever his sense of human justice—towards people of other races, religions and pigmentation—under the querulous demands of commercial or political expediency. A newspaperman, however fine and strong his nature may be, runs the terrible risk of losing his sense of human participation. He can easily lose that feeling that nothing human is alien to him. When this happens what is there left? Only the empty husk of a man. He becomes the kind of man who is hardboiled and blasé about other peoples' tragedies and bitter about his own. He becomes cynical about human virtues as well as human weaknesses.

In Asia we cannot afford the luxury of such sterile cynicism. Newspapermen have often to stand up against popular fervor when it is misdirected and agitated beyond the limits of law and order and fundamental human decency. He cannot sit back and merely record the passing parade indifferently. More than ever before, our tasks, our needs and our urgency are the same. We are involved in the possible growth or degradation of Asia. Let us hope that we will be given the strength to bear intelligently and honorably this involvement in the life of the people of which we are an articulate segment.