PDI: 40 years of forging trust
American politician Lincoln Chafee has a simple formula for that thing called trust. “Trust,” he said, “is built with consistency.”
Learning to trust someone—a person, an organization, an institution — is an exercise in incrementally believing over time, through actions big and small that deepen and strengthen the connection between the two parties.
Trust is at the heart of the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s relationship with its readers over the last four decades. Not coincidentally, as the paper marks its 40th anniversary today, the 2025 edition of the Reuters Digital News Report has brought a reaffirmation of the strength of that relationship: According to the report, among all the broadsheets in the country, the Inquirer remains the most trusted by Filipinos, at 63 percent.
Across all media outfits, the Inquirer emerges second only to TV-radio broadcaster GMA Network, at 67 percent.
Earning—and maintaining—that level of public trust through 40 tumultuous years is no small feat, especially in light of the breakneck changes in technology, the fragmentation of the consuming market, and the rampant “information disorder” on social media, as Reuters noted.
But if anything, the Inquirer built a tough, sturdy foundation for its compact with readers via the most challenging of beginnings—through the fire, so to speak.
Scrappy weekly
Starting first as a scrappy weekly put up by intrepid journalist Eugenia “Eggie” Apostol in 1985 to cover the Sandiganbayan trial of soldiers accused in the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., the Inquirer became a daily newspaper on Dec. 9 of that year. The impetus was dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of a “snap” presidential election to be held in February 1986.
As eventual Inquirer editor in chief Letty Jimenez Magsanoc once recalled, the prospects for a media upstart were “suicidal in the time of martial law. The so-called major dailies were owned and controlled by Marcos through his relatives and cronies.”
At the time, Apostol felt that the Filipino people deserved another source of news—”a broadsheet like no other,” one “fearless in the face of repression, unflinching in its commitment to the truth.” Her instincts proved correct. Filipinos, long under the heel of a dictatorship that had driven the country to an unprecedented social and economic malaise, hungered for stories otherwise censored or ignored by the crony press.
Newspaper of record
Covering the snap election was the immediate task, but when the Inquirer hit the streets and was immediately snapped up by readers—30,000 copies, all sold out—the truth was out: The “mosquito press” was what the people trusted, and henceforth the Inquirer would be there for them. From that modest initial run, the paper’s circulation and readership would only grow by leaps and bounds—within five years overtaking another daily to become the biggest broadsheet in the country.
Even as the Inquirer became the newspaper of record, setting the agenda for the national conversation, seeking accountability for the most serious issues of the day, and chronicling history as it unfolded, it continued to be tested by adversarial forces.
The 1999 ad boycott initiated by then President Joseph Estrada that lasted five months drained the paper of advertisers, but the Inquirer, backed by its owners, the Rufino-Prieto family, didn’t flinch in reporting the goings-on in the Estrada presidency with thoroughness and accuracy.
Years later, President Rodrigo Duterte’s assault on the Philippine press would include overt pressure and public attacks directed at the Inquirer, beginning early in his presidency in 2016 when the paper dared to publish a front-page photo of a woman cradling her dead husband in her arms—a victim of “tokhang,” the blood-soaked drug war that Duterte had unleashed on the nation.
Enduring bond
It was the Inquirer, too, that broke the biggest political bombshell to rock the nation in decades. The P10-billion pork-barrel scam reports in 2013 led to the imprisonment of three powerful senators and the rewriting of the country’s laws on congressional allocations. Alas, the billions siphoned off in that scam now seem merely a rehearsal for the trillions of pesos plundered under the flood control mess of the Marcos Jr. administration.
As always, where things are, the Inquirer is there—the work made even more agile these days as print has been integrated with the far-reaching digital platform Inquirer.net, the most-visited news website in the country. In chasing without letup the stories that matter, it continues to shine a light on our nation’s life with the same rigor and commitment to excellent journalism that were already its hallmarks 40 years ago.
Trust in the truth of the narratives it delivers to the Filipino public—that accounts for the enduring bonds between the Inquirer and its readers for some two generations now.
That trust has been hard-won and hard-kept. We keep this in mind as the Inquirer opens a new chapter treasuring this covenant.
