Mocha Uson to lead Inquirer social media

SINGAPORE—Not everything on the internet is true. Especially not the clickbait headline above. But surely you read the whole column even if you are on free data.

What is truth in media, given last week’s US presidential debate and our own President Duterte’s Hitler comments?

Last week’s column had the clickbait headline: “Is the Mocha Uson blog evil?” I argued one may disagree with her, but outright dismissal as illegitimate is a completely different attack.

Mocha’s video reaction had 326,000 views and 8,267 Facebook shares. “Maganda po ang kanyang sinabi at ang kanyang pagpapaliwanag kung bakit binabasa daw itong blog na ito ng marami,” she said.

She named journalists she respected, as I suggested. She then used my column as a springboard to criticize perceived media bias, specifically naming Rappler and Time.

But almost all the 2,356 comments on Mocha’s video were furious over my column praising her. A handful asked their “ka-DDS” to read the column first and pasted its entire text.

US media and even presidential debate moderators have been criticized for passively reporting Republican candidate Donald Trump’s colorful statements, unwittingly providing billions of dollars of free coverage, instead of contextualizing that many are outright lies.

The Washington Post rated 65 percent (49/75) of major Trump statements “four Pinocchios” or totally false. HillaryClinton.com claims Trump spoke for 46 minutes during the debate and lied 58 times.

US media thus became more active. “Fact check” became the new buzzword. CNN even used “reality check.”

The New York Times deployed 18 reporters to fact check presidential debate statements within five minutes. Moderator Lester Holt confronted Trump with past contradictory statements. Clinton explicitly called for fact checkers during the debate.

The internet has long since reshaped media’s role. Anyone with a smartphone can post a photo, video or spontaneous report. Many more speakers create news and inherently beat mainstream media to the scene. Given how actual videos and documents can be shared, media’s responsibility shifted from documenting raw facts to contextualizing and curating.

Should media go beyond verifying raw facts to spoonfeeding context?

For legal issues, media would be irresponsible if they failed to provide context. Trump, for example, claimed “stop and frisk” worked very well in New York City. Holt immediately cited a 2013 court order halting NYC’s stop-and-frisk program. It resulted in racial profiling; 83 percent of stops in 2004-2012 challenged blacks and Hispanics.

Even more basic fact checks are required to communicate legal issues in the Philippines, where the image a “legal expert” projects counts for more than arguments, and where four Pinocchio propositions that would be thrown out of a freshman law class routinely make headlines.

In the Torre de Manila Supreme Court hearings, for example, it was underreported that lawyer William Jasarino repeatedly admitted that the case had no legal basis, invoked a nonexistent procedure he called “writ of pamana,” and Justice Marvic Leonen hinted the lawsuit was unethical. Historian Ambeth Ocampo publicly challenged how media features repeatedly cited the Venice Charter that the Philippines never signed.

It was underreported that when former House representative Neri Colmenares sued to block Ferdinand Marcos’ burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, justices raised that the law he invoked applied to a different cemetery. And that when he sued against the Cybercrime Act in 2013, he told justices, “I’m not very good at the Internet” and “I am not familiar with the technology.” And that when he sued the power industry in 2014, he told justices, “I’m not very familiar with Epira [Electric Power Industry Reform Act]” and “I’m not familiar with gaming the [electricity] contracts.”

A Far Eastern University undergraduate lecturer, lawyer Jesus Falcis III, filed a Supreme Court petition to legalize same-sex marriage. It was underreported that Solicitor General Florin Hilbay strenuously opposed the petition for lacking the most basic requirements, down to there being no suing couple for the Supreme Court to marry, and arguably sabotaging same-sex marriage advocacy. The case would not be named the “Falcis case” if there was an actual client.

Beyond law, even the New York Times uploaded video clips of President Duterte comparing himself to Adolf Hitler. The Inquirer uploaded the complete video with transcript.

Yesterday, Mocha shared a “Freedom Society” post with the pictures of Reuters correspondents Karen Lema and Manuel Mogato and the caption, “Irresponsible journalists must be punished.” It argued that any Filipino who watched the complete video would understand that Mr. Duterte was protesting how his critics compare him to Hitler, and they should have laid this context instead of soliciting quotes from Jewish organizations.

Mr. Duterte eschews sound bites for a conversational style difficult to quote verbatim. I previously wrote that when Mr. Duterte said he should have been first when an Australian missionary was gang-raped, he was repeating the black humor he used during a 1989 jailbreak. That Mr. Duterte cited our Constitution verbatim when he declared a “state of lawlessness.” That he meant journalists are not the only ones killed when he said: “Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a b—-.”

However, if one calls for media to go beyond quoting even actual video clips and to actively present context even at the risk of editorializing news, one must accept that this new paradigm is not “bias media” or “presstitution” but fidelity to truth.

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