This article was written last year before Maria Ressa won a Nobel Peace Prize. It has been overtaken by events relative to the campaign for the May 2022 election. What we are seeing now is how the fact-checkers are going against their opponents on social media platforms. Mainstream media has is now open with their bias for the opposition’s candidates. There is no objectvity at all even in news coverage. Public distrust in mainstream media is high. It is ironic that in an age where access to information is at our fingertips, we are left on our own to determine what the truth is.
Since Duterte won the Presidency in 2016, there has been an organized effort to cast him and the Philippines in a bad light, both here and abroad. Duterte is associated with populism, fascism, tyranny and dictatorship, at least this is what his detractors want Filipinos and foreigners to think of him whenever his name is mentioned. Despite these efforts, Duterte maintains his popularity, trust and approval ratings with the Filipino people. Presidents usually end up as lameducks in the final year of their term but this is not the case with Duterte. He won with only 39% of the vote in 2016 but has consolidated his base in his five years in office. This was evident in the 2019 midterm election when the opposition Senatorial slate was shut out. Not one of their eight candidates landed in the top 12 to qualify for a Senate seat.
Rappler and Vera Files are controlled by Maria Ressa and Ellen Tordesillas. Both organizations claim to be for the truth and serve as fact-checkers but they’re far from being independent and objective. The truth is both serve as mouthpieces for the opposition. There is hardly any objectivity in any of their articles or news reports. This is also true for other media outlets controlled by anti-Duterte oligarchs. Other media outlets identify with the administration while continuing to have a balanced line-up of columnists in their op-ed sections. But by and large, “journalists” who work for foreign news bureaus and media companies are generally anti-administration as well. They claim to be “journalist-activists” which means that they are not objective in their news reports but biased towards one side. This violates one of the basic tenets of journalism which is objectivity. There is an overt effort to turn public opinion against the administration. This was the case before when the US decided that it was time for Marcos to go. Americans have always been transactional with leaders they deal with. The US doesn’t recognize the mandate of the International Criminal Court because it would prevent interventions in sovereign states where they are pushing for regime-change, one way or the other.
The most recent examples are in the Middle East and Africa with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Whenever and wherever American interests are at stake, you can be sure that the US will take action for an outcome in their favor. The US employs various methodologies to gain influence and improve their image in target countries. The bulk of the task falls on the US Agency for International Development (USAID). This agency provides funds for different types of development projects. In the 90s, it focused in Mindanao, partnering with an NGO, Growth for Equity in Mindanao (GEM). USAID financed the construction of the airport in Tambler, General Santos and the renovation of the Makar Wharf. The vested interest in this airport and seaport was the push for the grant of autonomy to Muslim Mindanao. The US wanted to re-establish bases in the country but didn’t want to go through the Senate again where the bases agreement was scrapped in 1991. The MOA-AD which the GMA administration pushed for was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional and the Americans again failed in achieving their goal. The other manner is to influence and sway public opinion into voting into office a friendly administration. Rappler was established for this purpose in 2012.
It’s initial project was to aid in the conviction of then Chief Justice Renato Corona at this Senate Impeachment Trial. I don’t think Maria Ressa herself came up with the idea of a social news network. It’s probably more the product of her sponsor, the Omidyar Network and its other partner, the Open Society Foundation of George Soros. The Rappler Mood Meter was designed for this purpose to get immediate feedback about reader’s opinions on the articles and news stories posted to gauge their effectiveness. Then there is Vera Files. The Wiki entry for Vera Files describes it as “Vera Files (stylized as VERA Files) is a non-profit online news organization in the Philippines. It was founded in March 2008 by veteran Filipino journalists, focusing on investigative journalism and in-depth reporting of Philippine social issues. The organizations specializes in producing “research-intensive and in-depth reports in multiple formats, and the training and mentoring of journalists, students and civil society organizations, especially those whose opportunities for capacity building are scarce.”[1] It released its first story—an exposé on a controversial agreement involving disputed territory—on March 9, 2008. The story was written by Yvonne T. Chua and Ellen Tordesillas and published by GMA News Online and Malaya.[2] In 2017, Vera Files became the first news organization in the Philippines to be a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter.[3]” Post-Marcos saw the emergence of the term “civil society groups.”
This later evolved to non-governmental organizations or NGOs, which partnered with the government in development projects. It then became the norm for the heads of these NGOs to be appointed to government posts. Most of them are allied with the Yellows as these NGOs are nothing but fronts for promoting liberal or neoliberal ideology. We have seen Butch Abad, Dinky Soliman, Teresita Deles and other appointed to Cabinet or heads of agency posts during the PNoy administration. The common denominator among all of the abovementioned is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED itself is a US-based NGO funded by the US government and is bipartisan. This means that depending on the current US President, it can be used to promote conservative or liberal agenda, as the case may be. The Wiki entry describes it as “The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a non-governmental organization in the United States that was founded in 1983 for promoting democracy in other countries by promoting democratic institutions such as political groups, trade unions, free markets and business groups. NED is funded primarily by an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress.
The NED was created by The Democracy Program as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation, and in turn acts as a grant-making foundation. In addition to its grants program, the NED also supports and houses the Journal of Democracy, the World Movement for Democracy, the International Forum for Democratic Studies, the Reagan–Fascell Fellowship Program, the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, and the Center for International Media Assistance.” Independent US media outlets have often accused the NED of being a CIA front for overt action against governments deemed hostile to American interests. It is interesting to note that since Duterte’s assumption to the Presidency, the NED has been actively approving grants to Philippine NGOs. The charts below are from the NED website.
As you will note from the above, various Philippine NGOs, mostly in the promotion of human rights and other liberal causes, are being funded by the NED, including media outlets such as Rappler, Vera Files, the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) and the Mindanao Institute of Journalism, which publishes the print and online edition of MindaNews. Among the NGOs, the most prominent recipients of several grants are the Caucus of Development NGO Networks (Code-NGO) and the International Center for Transformation and Excellence in Governance (INCITEGov), which share common board members in the persons of the late Dinky Soliman, Butch Abad and Ging Deles, all of whom held government posts under the PNoy administration.
The grants increased during the period 2016 through 2018 after the election of Rodrigo Duterte as President. On this basis alone, the NGOs and media outlets should actually register as foreign agents, because they’re receiving foreign funding and promoting causes which don’t actually redound to the benefit of Filipinos and the government. They’re in fact, engaged in turning public opinion against the administration and other acts inimical to the interest of the Philippine government. What makes it worse now is we have “journalist-activists” who make their bias known to the public in their news reports and on social media platforms with the same goal of influencing public opinion. Journalism was a noble profession in the past because the fourth estate was supposed to protect the people from government overreach and corruption. This is not the case now. The construct we’re seeing is how journalists have become mercenaries for money and influence in their industry and to improve their social standing as well. The ultimate goal now is to become celebrities themselves, or as in the case of Maria Ressa, become the news.
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