Bad news is supposed to sell. But when speculative news trumps hard (but good) news, you have to wonder if some news organizations have not taken it upon themselves to see only the unflattering and to cast aside the uplifting in a strange attempt to peddle their wares.
The bad news in question is a speech delivered by President Rodrigo Duterte in Davao City last Saturday, during which he said that if he wanted to, nothing could stop him from declaring Martial Law. His own personal preference aside, Duterte also qualified that he may reimpose military rule if the illegal drug menace gets “virulent.”
Media should by now understand that Duterte was once again engaged in one of his usual anti-drug rantings. And also (and again), his threat to impose Martial Law was surrounded by so many qualifiers and conditions that no one in his right mind could reasonably conclude that he is well on his way to bringing back military rule.
To read into Duterte’s statement a declaration that Martial Law is in fact impending or inexorable—something that again leads to the non-news territory of speculation—is preposterous. But I will admit that if some other president not as passionate and insistent about ending the illegal drug trade had given that speech, it would be nothing short of earth-shaking.
But we’re talking about Duterte here. And it’s not even the first time that he has gone off on a threatening rant to pursue his campaign against a situation that he really gets worked up over.
And let’s not even get into the fact that the imposition of Martial Law has always been an option for any Philippine president, as prescribed in the various constitutions that we have had and as it is enshrined in most constitutions governing democratic countries. If Martial Law were bad per se, the framers of our basic laws, going all the way back to the 1935 Charter, would not have written provisions allowing it.
Even in the United States at present, Martial Law is being discussed as an option of the government in order to protect itself under the incoming administration of one Donald J. Trump. And the US government merely requires a “clear and present danger” to allow the unsheathing of this draconian option; current Philippine law requires the president to seek approval of Congress and to defend any such declaration before the Supreme Court.
Martial Law is just not happening. And even if it were, I wouldn’t bet on the people not supporting Duterte, if he does decide to declare it.
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On the real news front, there’s the Malacañang report during the same weekend just past quoting Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez, to the effect that in a little over six months, the Duterte administration has secured P900 billion in grants and concessional loans from just two countries. There is just so much going for this story that it really pains me to see what little “play” it received, compared to the unreal Martial Law reports.
The background, of course, is the deferment by the US-funded Millennium Challenge Corp. of its new aid package to the Philippines, supposedly because of concerns about human rights violations committed by the Duterte administration. For the five-year period of 2010-2015, MCC gave out around P21 billion to fund three major projects of the Aquino administration.
The sky was supposed to have fallen then, especially after Duterte again went on the warpath against the US, saying that the Philippines didn’t need any conditional American aid because other countries were offering the same (and a lot more) without telling us how to run our country. And besides, Duterte said—to much tongue-clacking and head-shaking from his critics—that the Philippines can survive without anybody’s handouts, thank you very much.
Now, it turns out that from just China and Japan alone and in just six months, Duterte’s government has already secured almost a trillion pesos in grants and aid collectively known as Official Development Assistance for the next five years. That’s a record, Dominguez said, for any Philippine government for any five-year period, not to mention a record for the first half-year of any government in the past.
The China-Japan ODA packages are the same as the US Millennial Challenge grants, in that they are targeted to fund specific projects and will in all likelihood be implemented using studies, technology and even private contractors provided by the granting countries. The only difference being, as Duterte already pointed out, that both China and Japan are letting the Philippines deal with the illegal drug problem and other initiatives of the new government the way it wants to deal with them.
But despite Duterte’s hunch about foreign aid being proven correct—or perhaps because of it—the Dominguez story was relegated to the inside pages of newspapers and given short shrift in the rudimentary and superficial business reports of broadcast news. And there are some in media who still profess that they cannot understand Duterte’s animosity towards the Fourth Estate.
Fair is fair. Except, of course, when you’ve decided—regardless of all evidence to the contrary—to be relentlessly unfair.
And if media doesn’t get the message and get it pretty soon, bad news won’t even sell anymore. It will just be bad news, repeated endlessly in the tiny, out-of-step echo chambers of unreasonable critics.