Manipulating public opinion

 

 

For the misled and deceived public, including those in supposedly intelligent discussion forums in social media, the word “manipulation” often has pejorative connotations, implying unfair or deceptive strategies. But the Webster Dictionary defines it more broadly as an act of change by artful or unfair means to serve one’s purpose. Manipulation therefore may be either artful or deceptive. If it is artful, people may show admiration; if it is deceptive, the reaction may be outrage.

 

When public opinion is manipulated by agents of the government and its friends in the media to deflect criticism of its policies or performance or for some malicious purpose like demonizing a sitting vice-president who’s seen as an unworthy successor to the incumbent president, the absence of public outrage is very disconcerting. Major newspapers and television networks carry in their daily reportage unfounded allegations of corruption against the vice president. Even the social media like Facebook and Twitter are replete with opinions or messages bordering on libel that assail the integrity of the vice president and his family for unexplained wealth and their political dynasty.

 

The manipulation of public opinion against the vice president is in fact distasteful and not very artful, although it creates the desired result of making him look guilty. It is clearly deceptive because the obvious purpose is to character-assassinate the vice president at this early stage. If successful, the vice president would be seriously handicapped in explaining his side before he even declares his official candidacy for the presidency.

Philippine Vice President Jejomar Binay

But the troublesome question is where the public outrage is. As usual, there is no conviction or finding of culpability, yet the public is being rushed to hang the vice president on the cross.

 

Spearheading the manipulation of public opinion against the vice president are two senators with similar dubious political records, Senators Antonio Trillanes and Alan Cayetano. Trillanes is a former navy officer and perennial coup d’état instigator who served more than seven years in prison for inciting rebellion against a duly elected government. He was elected while in prison and was officially pardoned by the current president so he could serve his term in the Senate.

 

Cayetano is a scion of a prominent political family. His wife is mayor of the city of Taguig and a former congresswoman, his older sister is also an incumbent senator, a younger brother is a congressman, and another brother is a former councillor of Muntinlupa. Allegations of corruption hound Senator Cayetano regarding pork barrel funds he received from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), and his wife, for alleged overpricing in the purchase of multi-cabs for the city of Taguig.

 

This is like mud wrestling. Regardless of who wins, all are covered with muck.

 

Both senators have also made known their intention to run for the office of the President after President Noynoy Aquino steps down in 2016. The curious thing is how the public is being misled to believe that the vice president is a crook and the two senators are not. There are also reports that a powerful bloc supporting Aquino is responsible for the attacks against the vice president so that their own presidential bets will not be hamstrung by Jojo Binay’s presidential ambition.

 

Vice President Jojo Binay is not even the president; yet, he is now at the vortex of a political tsunami. President Aquino must be enjoying the political mudslinging in Congress and the ensuing publicity in newspapers and social media drama because they deflect all criticisms against his failings and shortcomings.

 

For instance, as the country suffers from continuing power outages and snail-paced traffic on busy thoroughfares, all President Aquino could do was to ask for more understanding and patience from all affected businesses and frustrated commuters. Aquino has even blamed (again!) his predecessor, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, for the problems concerning the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) and the Light Rail Transit (LRT). It’s estimated that the traffic gridlock alone is costing the Philippines close to P2.4 billion a day, which will grow to P6 billion a day in 2030.

 

Meanwhile, President Aquino is reportedly planning to ask Congress to grant him emergency powers to deal with the country’s looming power crisis. Here is one clear example of how the Aquino administration is trying to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision to limit the executive’s budgetary and spending powers without congressional authorization by striking down the PDAF and DAP. Malice is evident in President Aquino’s ploy to use emergency powers so he could divert billons from the Malampaya Fund to the Liberal Party 2016 campaign chest. Since the Malampaya funds are disbursed at the sole discretion of the President, anything goes as far as where he or Budget Secretary Florencio Abad wants these funds to go. The Malampaya Fund could be the largest pork barrel at the disposal of the President, and it has not been investigated or audited because the fund is not subject to congressional oversight.

 

The President’s much-ballyhooed Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, a conditional cash transfer program aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in the Philippines by investing in health and education, is now considered by many as a failed social welfare dole-out. Patterned after the success of similar programs in Mexico and Brazil, the Philippine version is turning out more and more poor participants in the program. This prompted one member of Congress to criticize it as an impetus for poverty, instead of a solution.

 

Beyond just being a dole-out which was not the actual aim of the program, the government’s conditional cash transfer program has also become a veritable cash cow for corruption. It was reported that over P5 billion in conditional cash transfer (CCT) funds that were coursed through the Philippine Postal Corp. (Philpost) went missing and never reached the program’s intended beneficiaries. The irony of it all is this government-borrowed money, sanctioned by the International Monetary Fund, has been hijacked by corrupt government officials instead of being spent for the alleviation of poverty.

 

The President’s illegal Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) is yet to be fully accounted for. Considered as the President’s pork barrel, the DAP benefited lawmakers who were President Aquino’s party mates in the ruling Liberal Party. Senator Franklin Drilon, the sitting Senate President and a close ally of the President, is reported to have received P1 billion, the biggest allocation out of the total P10.08 billion in DAP.

 

Of the P1 billion DAP, Drilon got P450 million allocation for Jalaur Dam project, P150 million for the Iloilo River Development Program and P100 million for Iloilo Convention Center, all located in Drilon’s home province of Iloilo. Drilon’s unimaginable biggest share of the DAP could be one reason why Budget Secretary Abad is having problems releasing the list of lawmakers who received DAP funding.

 

Now, Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago wants the Senate to look into allegations of corruption in the construction of the Iloilo Convention Center reportedly funded through Senator Drilon’s pork barrel funds. Santiago wants Hillmarc’s Construction Corp., the contractor for the construction of the Iloilo Convention Center be investigated. This is the same contractor of the allegedly overpriced Makati City Hall Building 2, which is currently under investigation by the Senate blue ribbon subcommittee.

Artist's perpective of how Iloilo Convention Center would look like when
completed. The structure is a pet project of Senate President Franklin Drilon
and partly funded from DAP funds. Photo courtesy of Iloilo Business Park.

Senator Santiago is said to be interested to know how Hillmarc’s has cornered super-lucrative public works contracts. The 11-storey Makati City office and parking building is the subject of a plunder complaint against Vice President Jejomar Binay, his son Makati Mayor Junjun Binay, and several other Makati government officials. The Iloilo Convention Center, a pet project of Senator Drilon funded partly from his P200-million allocation from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) in 2012 and P100 million from the DAP in 2013, is also said to be overpriced by P531 million.

 

In the past, Hilmarc’s has constructed several other government buildings which include the city halls of Bacolod and Calamba, the House of Representatives Annex Building, the Sandiganbayan Centennial Building, the Quezon City Museum, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas buildings in Naga City and Negros Oriental. The inference here is that the bidding process might have been rigged in favour of Hillmarc’s, yet the government’s role and Senator Drilon’s personal interest and involvement are being downplayed as if the awarding process was corruption-free.

 

If the so-called accomplishments of President Noynoy Aquino are subjected to a rigid litmus test, it would show that he had come up short. But Aquino’s spinmeisters are clever to stay on the message—that their crafted message is the only message the established media must cover. Thus, hardly does this President own up to his accountability and the public remains ever loyal to him.

 

I am not an apologist for Vice President Binay. The only connection we had was the one-time experience of marching together during the anti-Marcos demonstrations in Manila when he was a MABINI lawyer advocating for the civil rights of protesters. I don’t have any grudge against Senator Drilon but I have known him well as a pro-management lawyer in the service of multinational companies during my work in labour relations in the Philippines.

 

In any case, both Binay and Drilon should come up clean. Admittedly, they would not take accountability for their own acts of corruption, if any. Senators Trillanes and Cayetano should also consider ending their charade in Congress, for it makes them look less and less respectable and worthy to even be mentioned as presidential aspirants.

 

Since time is running short, it is about time for President Aquino to face up to the facts of his administration. That there are many shortcomings which he can no longer hide and cover up with presidential crafted talk. That his so-called singular achievement of detaining corrupt government officials still falls short of his promise of “daang matuwid” unless he is able to convict them for corruption and plunder.

 

Left to their own devices, the public will continue to be disinclined of suspicious political rhetoric. To recognize that deceptive and misleading political communication is being used to manipulate public opinion is another thornier issue because even the supposedly intelligent among us have become either a willing herd or pack of innocent voices of the government’s official line.

Watchdog reporting & gotcha journalism

 

 

The works of investigative journalists have enabled the porousness of today’s social media or the Internet in general in creating a virtually open source community.

 

Professor Sheila S. Coronel, Director of the Toni Stabile Center of Investigative Journalism of Columbia University, led an afternoon of interactive and interesting conversation last March 18 at the University of Toronto OISE with a very enlightening presentation on how some of the world’s controversial leaders have been brought down by combing out the vastness of the sea of information about their certain tendencies, weaknesses and penchant for displaying their caché of ill-gotten wealth. Whether it was the number of mansions, luxurious Bentley cars and Patek Philippe watches, or collection of Christian Louboutin and other brands of the most expensive shoes, Prof. Coronel guided the audience through several websites and tools investigative journalists use in tracking down such brazen display of corruption by publicly elected officials or by their wives.

Professor Sheila S. Coronel, Director of  the Toni Stabile Center of Investigative
Journalism of the University of Columbia, discusses how journalists and supporters
of the Kiev protests gathered  and disseminated information against former Ukraine
President Yanukovych that led to his downfall. Photo courtesy of PPCO.

Had my friend, Jesuit priest Terrence Fay, who teaches at the University of Toronto St. Michael’s College and celebrates the 8:30 mass every Sunday morning at our Lady of Lourdes Church on Sherbourne St., stayed a little longer to listen to Prof. Coronel, he would have been amazed by the diminutive Filipino woman as she spoke on how to bring down the powerful and corrupt through the ingenuity of investigative reporting. Our cultural weakness of starting on time and dwelling on unnecessarily long and tedious introductory remarks prevented Fr. Fay from staying, as he also had another book launch to attend that afternoon.

 

But today’s almost unlimited freedom of the Internet or free press is not without some drawbacks. Censorship is growing through various mechanisms of repression—from “deep packet inspection” hardware that can track unencrypted emails sent, websites and blog posts visited, to the more obvious regulation by government legislation. The Philippines’ newly-minted Cybercrime Prevention Law is one example of how the government can diminish freedom of expression by having the ability to prosecute criminal libel on the pretext of preventing child crimes or sex trafficking in cyberspace. All these attempts are aimed in slowing down the Internet for target users or communities such as investigative journalists, writers and whistleblowers.

 

In extreme instances where the state or its agents pay lip service to the notion of freedom of the press, journalists and government critics become easy prey of extra-judicial executions and disappearances. The Philippines ranks third in the world among countries with the highest number of journalists killed in this increasingly dangerous line of work.

 

Also at the heart of the ongoing dichotomy between unfettered freedom of information on one hand and regulation or restriction on the other is the long-standing issue of the individual’s right to privacy. Tabloid journalists by far are the most notorious in sacrificing accuracy and the personal privacy of their subjects in order to boost sales.

 

In the United States where there is no express constitutional right to privacy, the courts have fashioned out decisions protecting specific aspects of the Bill of Rights such as privacy of beliefs, protection of the home and persons against unreasonable searches, or the privilege against self-incrimination. There is continuing division among justices of the US Supreme Court on the question of a constitutional protection for privacy in ways not expressly provided in the Bill of Rights.

 

Justices belonging to the school of originalists like Scalia and Thomas have argued that no such general right of privacy exists. On the other hand, other justices argued for a broader reading of the Constitution and took the position of a more liberal interpretation, thus in many ways guarantee a fairly broad right of privacy.

 

In addition, a legal test of expectation of privacy has been developed over the years in the application of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. A long line of precedents has also established that users of the Internet, particularly Google’s Gmail, lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in messages sent using the service. These legal arguments arose out of proceedings against Google in regard of the US Federal Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and states’ Invasion of Privacy Acts, making email privacy as nearly impossible.

 

A guaranteed zone of privacy appears being gradually encroached upon, as further evidenced by Assange’s Wikileaks or Snowden’s leaks about NSA’s eavesdropping and collection of phone data on Americans and some world leaders. With a highly unregulated Internet and a porous social media, anyone nowadays can be a whistleblower or a crusader for the truth. The concept of privacy has become an anachronism in this day and age of computing.

 

While the right to privacy or at least the expectation of privacy has been losing its lustre in this electronic age, journalists or those who are in the business of investigating the truth are still subject to standards of ethics and of good practice. It’s not just privacy or the search for the truth that matters. Take for example what happened during the exchange after Prof. Coronel had finished her presentation.

 

Someone from the audience asked Prof. Coronel what should be done when certain journalists have crossed the line of decency and civility in news reporting and opinion writing. People from the back reacted with disconcerting murmurs and jeers about the current mudslinging in the local community press in Toronto.

 

While the question was not directly related to the ongoing conversation, it brings about legitimate concerns about ethical news reporting and expectations of fairness and civility. Simply put: it is about good manners. This is especially important when a reporter considers the amount of harm that could be caused to the subject of his or her story, or even to the community at large.

Thomas S. Saras, President of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada
shares his experiences about the work of investigative journalists and the challenges
they faced during the March 18 PPCO forum on watchdog reporting. Photo courtesy
of PPCO.

One of the ethical standards every journalist or reporter must uphold is the principle of harm limitation. Does everything a reporter has learned in the investigation of the subject need to be disclosed, and if so, how much? A reporter must also weigh the negative consequences of full disclosure.

 

The truth is not a runaway train. A reporter must disclose the truth but not necessarily in a way that affects others adversely. Or a reporter must be sensitive with the language he uses and must show good taste in reporting.

 

It was US President Theodore Roosevelt who popularized the term “muckraker” in a 1906 speech when he acknowledged that "the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck..."

 

Roosevelt stressed the social benefit of investigative muckraking reporting, but at the same time, he cautioned against the pitfalls of keeping attention only on the mud. He said: “There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.”

 

These are words that sound relevant to the current crisis of incivility or what many are calling “mudslinging” among members of the Toronto Filipino community press. The fact is this atmosphere of offensiveness is the handiwork of only one reporter, which has spawned a number of unnecessary libel suits against him, and his publisher by extension, by those who felt wronged and defamed. Even a Filipino sitting senator in the Canadian Parliament and his wife have joined the circus, forgetting that a public figure like him is not insulated or immune from criticism, even for work outside the confines of the Parliament.

 

In sum, this crisis in our community reflects on us all. It shows the level of maturity of our community leaders, the professionalism of our so-called local journalists, and the “egg-shell” protective lining of their egos. If one salvo of criticism would easily shatter their self-image, then they should avoid the public limelight where the most private account of human affairs could be dissected and disseminated like perennial fodder to a gossiping crowd.

 

The investigative journalists in our midst have gone berserk by exposing what they believe could destroy some individuals in our community, without regard to the total harm their reportage could cause. Two months from now and just in time with the celebration of Philippine independence day, leaders from every corner of our community would be appealing from their own soap boxes for support to the same cultural activities that brought this crisis upon the community: beauty pageants and contests. Meanwhile, the litigants in the various libel suits will continue testing the limits of freedom of expression, as if the courts are the best venue to redress their bruised egos.

 

Perhaps, if our journalists can be the true watchdogs of our community, they should train their investigative skills on the real and substantial impact of activities like beauty contests in promoting and enriching our cultural heritage. Instead of coddling the promoters of these inanities and simply requiring them to show transparency in the accounting of the monies they raised.

 

What have these beauty contests contributed in conveying our culture to our Filipino community in Toronto and the Canadian society at large? So far, in addition to treating our women as commodities, we also take pride in being sour dueling libelists, which keeps us in the muck, and only brings utter disgrace to our rich heritage and culture.