Ferdinand Marcos Jr. takes his oath of office noon of June 30. Marcos is the only scion of the leader of a country targeted by the US and the country’s opposition, for regime-change, to make it back by the very failure of his father’s successors to make good on their promised reforms to the people.
There was high expectations from Martin Andanar as the head of the PCOO when appointments were announced by the then incoming Duterte administration. Andanar himself laid out a plan to transform PTV-4 into a broadcast organization at the level of the BBC but this did not happen because of his ineptitude and poor managerial skills. The talent pool was shallow and he did not have a clear-cut reorganization plan for the government communications machinery. There was nothing professional about the quality of the programming on the government-owned broadcast network.
The incoming Marcos administration needs to be pro-active in light of the challenges it is up against. BBM is not Duterte, who is an excellent communicator, even if he does away with formal speeches at events he graces. But the Marcos administration will be the subject of more intense scrutiny than the Duterte administration for the simple reason that there is the need to build up the voter base of the opposition.
There is also the need to counteract the propaganda machine abroad which paints the administration in a bad light. The bias of Western media outlets against Duterte was obvious. This will not change under Marcos. It will only get worst.
My brief experience as a Content Writer in one of the government departments exposed me to the weaknesses of government communications. Believe it or not, the government does not have a centralized communications structure where departments and agencies coordinate on their communications strategy. Every department and agency is on its own. It does not help that the government does not even consider outsourcing this function to the more experienced PR and communications firms. This is primarily due to budgetary constraints.
The in-house communications teams are composed of millennials who lack experience in communications itself and working in government. They also have little or no background in the departments and agencies they work in. This makes the work doubly harder because most them cannot even come up with a content calendar and media plan well in advance. Much time is wasted on meetings about content and the result is there is no balance between content for traditional and social media. The result is a long gap in communicating the benefits of a department’s or agency’s policies and programs to the public.
The dominant demographic age group, which is the 18-45 bracket, do not have the attention span to read long articles. To them, a 1,000 word article is long, on the average. They rely more on audio-visual media which means they are able to relate more to videos, memes and infographic cards. This has given rise to the popularity of video-centric social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
During the first Marcos administration, communications was a priority which was why the National Media Production Center was established. There was effective and efficient utilization of the Philippine News Agency, as a wire service and the Philippine Information Agency, as the information dissemination arm of the national government across departments, agencies and local government units.
The incoming Marcos administration should appoint a competent and qualified professional to head the Presidential Communications and Operations Office if it wants to win the battle for the hearts and minds of the Filipino people. Unity can be achieved through conversion. There should be a conscious effort to counter the propaganda being propagated by local and foreign media outlets which run counter to the administration because of their obvious bias for the opposition.
The PCOO should be headed by a communications professional with the requisite background in content-generation and broadcast who will develop a whole-of-government approach to the essential task of communication and information dissemination.
As it stands, local media outlets are already banding together to do “battle” with the Marcos administration. They are joined by the local correspondents of foreign media outlets such as the Washington Post, Bloomberg and the BBC, to name a few. You cannot win by bringing a knife to a gunfight and so the government has to be ready in order to show to Filipinos and the rest of the world what the facts are as opposed to how the facts are to be interpreted by these biased media outlets.
Communications also plays a large role in attracting foreign direct investment and tourism. Both are important if the Philippines is to continue on the road to economic recovery. The Marcos administration needs to double its initial efforts to counter the negative perception being associated with the President-elect and his family. It will not be easy being put under the microscope but it does come with the territory. It is imperative that these efforts are successful in order to maximize the benefits to be derived from the economic reform package passed by the Duterte administration.
Comments