Thrilla in NAIA: My two cents

I really want to ignore this issue but I just couldn't help myself. For those who are not yet in the know, click here and here.  As they say, there are three sides to a story: your side, my side or the truth. In this case, there are four sides: journalist Ramon Tulfo's, celebrity couple Raymart Santiago and Claudine Baretto's, airline Cebu Pacific's and the truth. I know that giving my two cents on this story will neither contribute to world peace nor ease the current global financial crisis but I'll just go at it anyway:

1) The brawl between Tulfo and Santiago and Baretto wouldn't have happened in the first place if only Cebu Pacific had better customer service. If you're going to offload certain baggages for whatever reason, please have the decency to inform your passenger about it before his / her flight leaves, not upon arrival.

2) Baretto was said to have been berating and cursing a lowly, counter employee. Come on. These employees are only following management orders and company policy. Many of them are not even paid enough to absorb hate and ill will from clients. If you're going to berate and curse a Cebu Pacific employee, go after the "powers that be", as in the ones who are behind the policies that make traveling with the airline miserable.

3) As a passenger who wasn't initially informed that her (and that of her family's) baggages were offloaded, Baretto's complaint seems valid (though she should've been a bit nicer to the airline staff). Tulfo, as a journalist, should have at least approached it objectively and listened to all sides of the story. I'm all for press freedom but as Uncle Ben had said to Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man), with great power comes great responsibility. If he indeed felt sorry for the Cebu Pacific employee, hence the taking of pictures, he should've instead approached Baretto, told her to watch her words and handled the whole situation diplomatically. Documenting the incident will obviously only irk an already upset passenger. A witness who saw the brawl unfold at NAIA narrated her story on GMA-7's 24 Oras and actually took Baretto's side. The witness said that Tulfo even denied that he was documenting Baretto's tirade, attempted to even hide his camera and then hit Baretto when she tried to demand that he stop taking pictures of the incident. During the same telecast, "tough guy" Tulfo denied the witness' story and seemed even more concerned about the battle over public opinion.

4) As for the NAIA officials, sigh, how can you explain the lack of CCTV cameras in important areas of the airport? How could we go after the real bad guys (*cough* terrorists *cough*) should a really bad incident (*cough* bombing *cough*) happen? How could we defend Panatag (Scarborough) shoal against China if we couldn't even watch over our own airport? This is really pathetic.