Again, Aquino’s Pulse Asia is deployed

As expected, when the accusations against Chief Justice Renato Corona are collapsing under the weight of facts, President Aquino’s forces deploy what has proven in the past to be one of their most potent, yet vilest propaganda weapon: Pulse Asia with its polls.

Unfortunately, mainstream media have allowed themselves to be used in this stratagem, and run similar screaming banner headlines: “47% in poll say CJ guilty.”  The more objective headline which this newspaper’s online version and another major newspaper used: “43% of Filipinos uncertain about Corona’s guilt.”

Opinion surveys are legitimate research tools, but to use these as propaganda tools, as a bullhorn for a rabble-rouser and feeding on people’s misperceptions on the nature of polls, constitutes political prostitution and intellectual dishonesty on the part of pollsters.

Scholars from Jurgen Habermas to Pierre Bourdieu and Noam Chomsky, and even the great columnist Walter Lippmann, have long ago pointed out the polls’ basic conceptual flaw: Except for a miniscule segment of the population with direct knowledge of issues or with sufficient information, people’s views in modern mass society almost entirely depends on mass media.

Polls therefore do not measure a people’s wisdom, but merely the extent to which media have affected their views on any issue posed by the pollster—from which candidate to vote or which brand of detergent to buy. It’s garbage in, garbage out when mainstream media have been clearly biased against Chief Justice Renato Corona and for President Aquino. (One example: Banner headlines screamed in January, “45 Corona assets eyed.” Has there been any banner story, even just a front-page one, on a fact recently proven: “Prosecutors dead-wrong on CJ’s ‘45 assets’ claim”?

Pulse Asia’s malevolent intent is obvious in the fact that it conducted its poll Feb. 26 to March 9, when only the prosecution had hurled its accusations, with Corona’s defense starting only March 12. Pulse Asia hasn’t even made public the actual survey questions it used, which probably elicited the “guilty” responses it wanted. Contrast this mercenary outfit to the more professional Social Weather Stations, which has refused—so far—to undertake such a designed-for-propaganda survey. Contrast it to Laylo Research Strategies polls, which focused on people’s perceptions on the Senate’s fairness and awareness of the trial.

Pulse Asia poll itself shows another of polls’ flaws: All respondents are assumed to have an opinion or the necessary information on the topic presented, yet they are asked to respond. This results in Pulse Asia’s irrational finding that 47 percent of respondents think Corona is guilty, yet 67 percent have little or no knowledge of the impeachment case.

Aquino’s cousin Antonio Cojuangco had initially bankrolled Pulse Asia when it was set up, and was run by another cousin, Rapa Lopa, until 2009. After its start-up, a polling firm can operate as long as it has paid-for or commissioned poll projects. I dare Pulse Asia to disclose who commissioned its impeachment survey.

Pulse Asia indubitably has had an ignominious track record of advancing Mr. Aquino’s political agenda in the guise of opinion polls and it has used the same modus operandi of undertaking a survey right after a media barrage, and then having the press headline its findings:

Case 1: “President Arroyo, the most corrupt president—Pulse Asia ” (December 2007 headline). Of course most respondents in that poll picked Arroyo as the most corrupt president! It was made Oct. 26 to 31, 2007, when people were barraged with front-page news of allegations—to this day unproven—of corruption. The poll in effect unprofessionally and unrealistically asked respondents to quickly retrieve from their memory and compare all the cases of corruption for each of the five presidents, such as Marcos’ Swiss bank accounts or Estrada’s P2-billion ill-gotten bank deposits. That has been a diabolical masterpiece—commissioned by Sen. Sergio Osmeña III—of manufacturing a fallacy disguised as “fact,” with the poll’s findings being repeated ad nauseam to the point that few bother to contest it.

Case 2: “The Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Most Corrupt Institution—Pulse Asia. ” (March 2011). The AFP in polls never before was ranked among the country’s most corrupt institutions. It was usually the police, the DPWH, and the Bureau of Customs.  But Pulse Asia’s survey was taken during the Senate’s televised investigations on alleged AFP corruption, which hugged the headlines for many days. Anticorruption reforms had in fact been undertaken in the AFP five years ago.

Case 3:  “Ombudsman Merci Gutierrez, the most unpopular official—Pulse Asia.” (February 2011) While media slavishly backed Mr. Aquino’s demonization of the former Ombudsman as an obstacle to his anticorruption campaign, Pulse Asia undertook this poll and, naturally, Gutierrez came out as the most unpopular government official at that time, bolstering the impeachment move against her. Two days after the poll was published, Gutierrez resigned. I don’t know how Pulse Asia president Ronald Holmes can sleep at night and even pretend to be an academic.

The intent of Pulse Asia’s recent poll is obvious:  To browbeat the senator-judges to follow a counterfeit “people’s voice.” Yellow columnists will henceforth be repeating over and over that the “people have already decided.”

“Vox populi, vox dei” down the ages has been a favorite quote of demagogues ignorant of the phrase’s origin, which was a warning to Charlemagne by the English scholar Alcuin: “Don’t listen to those who claim the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the mob’s frenzy always borders on insanity.”

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