MANILA, Philippines?It is perhaps typical of a young president like Benigno ?Noynoy? Aquino III to fuss over the communications strategy of his administration. After all, he?s part of a generation that not only prizes electronic gadgetry and the multimedia, but also considers them as determinants of the milieu and shapers of the times. But the public could not take such a sanguine look on the new President?s initiative to accord Cabinet ranking to all three key members of what he calls his Communications Group. Such is nothing less than the bureaucratization of public information. It is also a troublesome signal of the quality of decision-making in the new presidency.

Poised to become Cabinet-level ?communications specialists? (whatever that means) are lawyer Edwin Lacierda, newspaper columnist and Cory Aquino-era transportation undersecretary Herminio ?Sonny? Coloma, and ANC broadcaster Ricky Carandang. All three will effectively do the press secretary?s functions, which, in more innocent, less complicated times, used to be the province of only one Cabinet-rank official, the chief government spokesperson.

The troika, according Carandang, would constitute the Communications Group. The group would have two functions?one handling the crafting of messages for the President, the other taking charge of operations. Although Lacierda is presidential spokesman, he wouldn?t be the one crafting the message; Carandang indicated he himself would be the one in charge of ?messaging.? He didn?t deny he would be assisted by Manolo Quezon III, a columnist of this paper who had a public affairs program on ANC. Carandang added Coloma would be in charge of the bureaucracy.

For his part, Coloma said the new setup is not really new: Cory Aquino separated the functions of the spokesperson and the press secretary, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had a Cabinet-ranked communications director separate from her spokesman and press secretary. But these precedents don?t justify the new set-up. Depending how one would look at it, crafting messages for the President seems the function of the spokesperson; and the task of ensuring that government communications operations will be an effective vehicle for the dissemination of those messages seems part and parcel of the work of the press secretary who, in former times, was both spokesman and bureaucrat.

Would the unorthodox setup work? It?s too early to tell perhaps. What we know is that the President has made the Solomonic decision of providing separate turfs and functions for Carandang and Coloma even if, for all intents and purposes, the two occupy the press secretary?s seat. Carandang is said to be his personal choice, while Coloma is said to be championed by Maria Montelibano, the director of the Radio-TV Malacañang during the Cory presidency and who was P-Noy?s media director during last summer?s election campaign. There are two troublesome aspects about this decision.

One would be how a three-headed communications hydra with Cabinet rank would stand with the President?s own vows to streamline government and cut the budget deficit. The new setup would certainly bloat the bureaucracy aside from distending government expenditures. Already, Carandang and Coloma have indicated they would submit separate budgets. Moreover, could the new system be justified considering the bloated public-information bureaucracy? As a cursory glance of government plantilla would prove, there?s an overpopulation of communications specialists and public relations men in the bureaucracy, all of them entailing expenditures that worsen the government deficit.

The second aspect is even graver. The President has fussed about coming up with an effective communications strategy to justify the three-headed innovation. But he seems to have overlooked the ethics of communication. As he has indicated in very revealing remarks, some of the key personnel of his Communications Group had helped in his campaign while they were working in the press. Asked to justify the novelty, he said, ?There are a lot of people who helped us in our media campaign and I?m hoping that I can still retain all of them within this more formal structure. The two you?ve mentioned (Carandang and Quezon) are part of that group, but there are (other) people in that group.? Did Coloma also work in the campaign through Montelibano? Did the three make the proper press disclosures? Just as press ethics and conflict of interest may have been compromised, the new Communications Group may not really promote government transparency: it could be a formula for miscommunication.