Eugenia Apostol was editing a women's magazine in 1983 when the popular opposition figure Benigno Aquino Jr. was gunned down on the tarmac of Manila's airport. Most Filipinos blamed the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda for the killing. Two million people showed up for Aquino's funeral, but the event was ignored by the media. The following day, the top headline of a leading Manila daily was: TWO KILLED BY LIGHTNING.
Apostol fumed. Within days she was printing a tabloid version of her glossy Mr. & Ms. called Mr. & Ms. Special Edition. It had 16 pages of photographs showing Aquino's body, the multitudes that came to view it, and the massive funeral parade that wound through the streets of Manila for almost 12 hours. The first run was some half a million copies, yet it could not satisfy demand. In the coming months, as momentum built for the People Power revolution that would topple Marcos three years later, Apostol turned the tabloid into a weekly endeavor, putting it out from a raggedy office that, for security reasons, didn't even have the publication's name on the door.
The obvious choice as editor of Mr. & Ms. Special Edition was Apostol's friend Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc, the feisty former boss of a leading Sunday magazine. Two years earlier, Magsanoc had written a tongue-in-cheek story on Marcos' third inauguration as President. Marcos had sought to fend off criticism of his rule by staging a faux election. His "victory" was celebrated in a sumptuous, if surreal, ceremony, in which a choir sang Handel's Messiah. Magsanoc led off with a line from Handel: "And he shall reign forever and ever." Marcos thought that blasphemous and got her fired.
Apostol, now 81, and Magsanoc, in her mid-60s, were not firebrands in their younger days. Both were veterans of the lipstick beat, writing for the lifestyle sections of newspapers. But the assassination of Aquino, which sparked People Power, galvanized Apostol and Magsanoc to break the local media's complicit silence surrounding Marcos' oppressive rule. In late 1985 they phased out Mr. & Ms. Special Edition and launched the Philippine Daily Inquirer, trailblazing a brand of hard-hitting, mischievous, in-your-face reporting that tested the limits of a dictator's tolerance and helped Filipinos win their freedom. "In three months," says Apostol, "the Inquirer had not only helped to oust Marcos, it was also making money." Today, the Inquirer is the country's largest newspaper and, while sometimes criticized for sensationalism, it has been unflinching in its coverage of government and the Philippines' uneasy transition to democracy.
Though Marcos is gone, the Philippine press is once again under the gun. After Iraq, the Philippines is the most dangerous country for reporters — at least 13 have been killed in the past two years. A spate of lawsuits, including libel cases filed against 43 journalists by the husband of embattled President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, is casting a chill on the media. But Filipino reporters remain defiant, inspired by the example of Eugenia Apostol and Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc — two women who set the template for courageous journalism for a nation still very much in need of it.