Journalism incited our abiding interest in international affairs

We were delighted to see our old friend and fellow Pangasinense, the US-based Roger Oriel, who owns and publishes the popular Asian Journal newspaper, with circulation in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York City, and New Jersey.

Roger runs his modest network and the editor-in-chief in Los Angeles is daughter Cristina, a graduate of George Washington University, assisted by another daughter Carina, who graduated from Fordham University.

The Oriels of Binalonan, Pangasinan used to own the Oriel Vocational School in Tayug town for 50 years. They are friends with their townmate, the late First Lady Eva Macaraeg Macapagal and her daughter, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Roger began as a young account executive of SGV founded by the legendary Washington Sycip, then became a small publisher in 1982, graduating to lead the first Filipino Yellow Pages directory until 1990 with 600 pages in California.

In the Philippines, the Yellow Pages directory was introduced in 1958 by the American-based firm, GTE Directories Corporation.

We are encouraging the 68-year-old Roger to put up a Filipino-led newspaper in the Arab world, based in Dubai or Jeddah, followed eventually by a broadsheet in Iran’s capital Tehran to cover both the Shiite and Sunni cities of Islam.

We reminisced with Roger our years as a journalist, when at the age of 19 we became a foreign correspondent, then promoted to Manila bureau chief of the first Asian news agency, the Pan-Asia Newspaper Alliance, founded by the late Norman Soong, who was Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “favorite war correspondent” during World War II. The largest international news agencies at the time up to today are Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Reuters, and Agence France Presse (AFP).

We also had a Pan-Asia weekly column then, printed once a week in the old Philippines Herald, which in the old days was edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carlos P. Romulo, who later became President of the U.N. General Assembly and then our Minister of Foreign Affairs.

As a 19-year-old journalist, we flew to the then South Vietnam capital Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City (Hanoi was then North Vietnam’s capital) in 1956 for the Proclamation of the Vietnamese Constitution and the first anniversary of the Vietnam Republic following Vietnam’s partition at the waist in the 17th Parallel after the French forces’ classic defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

We went to Vietnam for the second time in 1959, when we were invited by then President Carlos P. Garcia to join him on a visit to Saigon. We remember sailing the Saigon River with President Garcia and the then South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem aboard the Vietnamese leader’s presidential yacht.

President Garcia also offered us the position of Press Attache at the Philippine Embassy in Vietnam or somewhere in Europe but we politely declined, with deep humility and gratitude, as we were then enamored with the adventure and honor of being a journalist at home and overseas.

Journalism opened many doors for us and deepened our abiding interest in international affairs, which, many years later, inspired us in founding and leading various Asia-wide and global organizations, like the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), Centrist Asia Pacific Democrats International (CAPDI), Asian Peace and Reconciliation Council (APRC), and Universal Peace Federation (UPF).

As a father, we are happy and proud that our New York Citybased daughter Leslie used to be columnist and editor for Barron’s, a leading financial magazine in the U.S. She finished Journalism at Columbia University in New York and her Master’s degree at Yale. Before joining Barron’s, Leslie taught at Columbia and had a short stint as a correspondent for Bloomberg in London.

Our son, third-term congressman Christopher de Venecia, was youth editor and columnist in another broadsheet and in a magazine for several years before he became representative of the fourth district of Pangasinan and current chairman of the House special committee on creative industry and performing arts.

As fate would have it, in 2016, 50 years after our relatively brief stint as a journalist (1956 to 1966) and having been elected five times, by God’s grace, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, we are back to writing a weekly column today here in the Manila Bulletin, which celebrates its “123 years of service and commitment to the nation.”

‘In 2016, 50 years after our relatively brief stint as a journalist (1956 to 1966) and having been elected five times, by God’s grace, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, we are back to writing a weekly column today here in the Manila Bulletin’