A number of Fil-Am opposition personalities flew in for the election. They were probably hoping for a Robredo victory, in their alternative parallel reality universe, but ran smack into the Marcos landslide which had been predicted by scientific surveys and not Google Trends.
One of them was Sheila Coronel. Her LinkedIn bio states that she is the Toni Stabile Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. Prior to this, she was the Dean of Academic Affairs and was the Executive Director of the Philippine Ceneter for Investigative Journalism up to 2006.
Ironically, Coronel’s father, Antonio, was Imelda’s first lawyer after her return from New York, where she won an acquittal from charges filed against her by then US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.
Her sister, Miriam, was appointed Chair of the GRP Panel to the peace talks with the MILF. She worked with then Presidentiall Adviser on the Peace Process, Teresita Deles. Both were the subject of scrutiny in the aftermath of the Mamasapano massacre, which was the result of the extraction authorized by PNoy of Marwan, the Jemaah Islamiyah bomb-maker who was with the MILF and had a $5M reward on his head by the FBI.
Coronel writes about her experience with Rappler on election day:
Rappler’s journalists reported on the cruel excesses of that war, which included thousands of extrajudicial killings by police and unknown gunmen, and exposed Duterte’s well-oiled online disinformation machine, which demonized dissenters and amplified the President’s call for blood. For Rappler, the blowback was swift: first online, mostly on Facebook, with a deluge of insults and threats to its reporters and Ressa in particular. Then came a barrage of lawsuits, so many that if the potential jail sentences from them were added up, Ressa would be imprisoned for more than a hundred years.
In 2019, Ressa was arrested by plainclothes officers who came to the Rappler office. She was detained overnight and posted bail, but, a month later, at the Manila airport, when she arrived home from an overseas trip, she was arrested again. In the newsroom, there was fear and dread. Editors stationed guards outside the Rappler office, in a suburban mall, and prepared the staff for more arrests and possible closure.
The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded last December, lifted morale in the newsroom and earned Rappler global acclaim. Duterte, now a lame duck, came under attack for corruption and the ineptitude of his pandemic response. As campaigning began in earnest, the country’s pro-democracy groups, battered by Duterte’s rule, coalesced around the candidacy of Maria Leonor Robredo, the current Vice-President. Her call for a more caring, transparent, and responsive government drew record crowds. Tens of thousands of youthful campaign volunteers believed a “pink revolution” was sweeping the country—pink was Robredo’s campaign color.
On Election Night in the Rappler newsroom, stacks of takeout food in plastic boxes—pork tonkatsu, butter chicken, shrimp tempura—had been ordered to see the staff through what was expected to be a long night. Instead, there was a stunned silence when Marcos, Jr.,’s landslide victory—the largest in the country in forty years—was clear from the moment the first results were beamed on the newsroom’s big screen. The staff struggled to focus on their work. Their editors had instructed them before the election that no matter the outcome, they should set their emotions aside. “Park your feelings,” the executive editor, Glenda Gloria, had said. “This election is not about you.”
The news editor, Paterno Esmaquel II, fielded queries from stunned reporters, who reached out to him on Telegram, asking for guidance on what they should do next. One reporter called in tears. He spoke to her calmly, giving her direction, but inside, he was thinking that all their efforts to inform the public had not been enough; so much more needed to be done. But that night, there was little else he could do, he said, except eat the tonkatsu. Mara Cepeda, a Rappler reporter who was in the field covering Robredo, was gobsmacked by the scale of Marcos, Jr.,’s win. “When those election results came in, we realized just how formidable the enemy was,” she said, referring to false narratives on social media. “To me, as a journalist, it means I had not done enough to counter disinformation.”
The operative word now is disinformation. It is not the truth. It is not the lies. But the operative question is, what constitutes disinformation?How is the truth separated from a lie? Who determines a lie from truth? Do we now battle it out on social media seeing as how that is where the media and the public interact? Or does it become a battle between traditional mainstream media and independent content creators seeing as how “journalists” deem it anathema for ordinary citizens appending the title to their blogs/vlogs?
Rappler is the mouthpiece of the opposition with the demise of ABS-CBN. Its reach is not the same though. Rappler’s readers and viewers are mostly ABC. Its reporters are the same. They are young, idealistic graduates of Ateneo, La Salle and UP who are bereft of critical thinking. They swallow what is fed to them by Rappler’s editorial team who are all staunchly anti-Marcos and anti-Duterte. To them, objectivity can be done away with since they are on the side of good against the evil of Marcos, Duterte and their allies. Thus it is natural for them to report in favor of the opposition.
There is no one left from the old school of journalism. Those who went into the profession in the same time as Coronel and Maria Ressa did, now lord it over the newsrooms of traditional and digital media outlets. The definition has changed as well. Traditional media are referred to as such because they still have print editions unlike Rappler and others which are one hundred percent online.
The traditional role of media was to protect the people from the abuses of the government and its officials. As such, it should not be taking sides between the administration or the opposition, but take the side of the public. This train left the station as it is now a battle for hearts and minds over ideologies, heavily influenced by the geopolitical battles being fought by superpower hegemons such as the US, Russia and China.
Ultimately, the public is the judge but if you think about it deeply, a lie can become the truth if repeated often enough and as Imeldific said in The Kingmaker, “perception is real and the truth is not.” The truth, is about perception and from that comes the opinion, which is still not the truth, until there is empirical evidence to prove it.
The discourse can go on and on on a philosophical basis and we would not be anywhere near what the truth is or what a lie is. The fact is Rappler is a foreign-funded media outlet operating in the Philippines where media ownership is limited to Filipinos. The fact is both Maria Ressa and Sheila Coronel have dual Filipino and American citizenships.
In truth and in fact, social media is both a boon and a bane, for everyone. But this is the environment we live in now so we just have to adjust, cope and practice discernment through critical and analytical thinking.
It is a fact that Robredo lost in the election. It is a fact that 31M Filipinos voted for Marcos as President. It is a probability that nothing will come out of the Angat-Buhay NGO because the opposition does not have the cognitive abilities to communicate with the D and E. It is a probability that most opposition stalwarts are suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. It is a fact that the opposition will not be able to devise a new strategy to regain the ground they have lost in the last six years due to their inability to recognize realities.
It is a fact that Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize but it does not mean that we should all be in awe of her or Rappler or any other Filipino who made good in America like Sheila Coronel.
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