Reinventing news

SHOCKED BY the precipitous 13-point plunge in his public opinion rating in just nine months, President Aquino has launched a media offensive to try to keep his popularity from being buried in a landslide.

The President’s reaction has all the hallmarks of a panic counter-attack. It was marked by a two-pronged approach: first, by berating the media for their emphasis on “negative news” and for downgrading news on his administration’s “accomplishments”; and, second, cranking up to overdrive the administration’s propaganda machine to project its claimed achievements

In trying to recoup lost ground, the President started to reinvent the definition of news which, according to the administration’s concept, sought to convert the independent media into mouthpieces of the government’s propaganda and to reduce the newspapers into official gazette, the most boring form of information designed by the human race since the invention of the printing press.

In his recent visits to Jakarta and Japan, Mr. Aquino, speaking to the Filipino communities there, complained: “I had good news to announce (but media) came out with stories about my love life. I asked, why is it that you are focusing on my love life—who I am courting , where we eat and what we talk about—instead of reporting that we have (good news) about fighting dengue?”

The simple answer is that the President is the most newsworthy and powerful person in this country, what he does is news, what he says, whom he talks with, whom he loves or ditches is news. Since he is a bachelor, people naturally are interested in who his girlfriend is because they regard their President as a human being like them, and this is news—and it is not bad news. Fighting dengue is also news, but it becomes compelling news when there’s a dengue epidemic, which means the government and health authorities are not doing their job.

The public have their own priorities of what news grabs their attention. They are the ones buying and reading newspapers, switching on the radio or television. They decide what information or news serves their interest, and shut off any news that is not worthy of their attention, that wastes their time—no matter how much information the government feeds the media about its achievements.

The recent opinion surveys showing a slump in the President’s satisfaction rating attribute the nosedive to the news about his predilection for luxury sports cars (swapping an old BMW for a Porsche). The public judged the President’s preference for such cars as a measure of whether he was setting a good example. They found him to be frivolous in his tastes. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were a private citizen; he could have raced on the expressways all he wanted. But he is the President, the number one citizen of this country.

The media keep on reporting this “bad news” because this is the kind of news the public likes to know. The public does not like to be spoon-fed with heavy doses of archival material, even though government handouts on its medium-term development programs are backed by data. Such materials are no doubt also news, but the public has an instinctive way of reading or rejecting news they read in the newspapers and hear over the radio and watch on TV. This is how the market place of ideas and information operates in reality.

In response to these messages sent by these public opinion surveys, the President keeps on nagging and chiding the press for the type of news they print or broadcast. In a speech in Iloilo over the weekend, Mr. Aquino said his administration had achieved a lot, citing, among other things, the conditional cash transfer program under which cash is handed out to the poorest families (in reality these are doles), for which the administration has budgeted P20 billion. He lamented that this program is being opposed by critics “despite our good intentions.”

“What is wrong in helping our poor countrymen?” he asked. He went on to call those who opposed this program “enemies of reform,” saying they were also the ones blocking the impeachment of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez.

The President then prodded his communication team to be “more aggressive in promoting the good news from the administration.” He said that sometimes the government was “too shy because people might say we are tooting our own horn.”

Why didn’t he ask himself why his propaganda team is not promoting the government’s achievements aggressively? Maybe his communicators do not believe there are many achievements to claim or would be embarrassed if these were found out to be false claims.

True, the media have their own standards of what is “good news” or “bad news” and their criteria are often the opposite of those used by government. Editors are aware that the conversion of their newspapers and radio-TV networks into government mouthpieces can only inevitably lead to their becoming deadly boring editions of the Official Gazette, which nobody reads.

The President’s approach to news dissemination is a formula for the demise of an independent media. It is worse than censorship. When nobody buys a newspaper or switches on the radio or TV because they are all reproductions of the Official Gazette, then the media are truly dead.