Ang Kapatiran: Does Idealism Have News Value?

Covering The Campaign
Ang Kapatiran
Does Idealism Have News Value?
BY Christian V. Esguerra

IT WASN’T exactly a reporter’s dream coverage.
Why stick your nose into the business of a group of  Catholics seeking to jumpstart a new kind of politics in the country? To think that with only three senatorial candidates—and virtual unknowns at that—Ang Kapatiran could easily be dismissed as a nuisance.
Any reporter would prefer to cover the more popular candidates, particularly those from Team Unity and the Genuine Opposition. And judging by the way media traditionally covered the elections, one couldn’t wait until these people went after each other’s throats. Not to mention the stories they loved to leak out during campaigns.
When our editors were yet to assign reporters for election coverage, I decided to check out Kapatiran. I was prompted by the front page of a newspaper that was dominated by pictures of candidates from the admi-nistration and the opposition.
While those candidates were indeed the big news that day, I felt there were other contenders besides the ubiquitous “Butch” Pichay or the fair-haired boy “Chiz” Escudero. The lesser-known candidates have stories to tell, too, I thought.
I was also encouraged by the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s habit of publishing “positive” stories (the ones usually with red tabs beside the headline). Judging by experience, I knew stories from the “other candidates” would find space in our newspaper.

Hardly a ripple
Kapatiran is not exactly a new political group. When it was launched three years ago, it hardly created a ripple in media.  Nandy Pacheco, advocate of a gunless society, was a founder of Kapatiran.
When told about a feature story that I was planning to do about the group’s candidates, Pacheco became excited. I visited the organization’s headquarters at Green Meadows where I was introduced to Martin Bautista, Jess Paredes, Adrian Sison, and Mario Ongkiko, who had not yet withdrawn his candidacy.
Questions were begging for answers. Why did they decide to run? Didn’t they have better things to do? Were they nuts?
Each of them was successful in his own profession. Paredes was a respected career government official who was banished for criticizing the government’s decision to allow the convicted rapist, US Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith, to be transfered to the US Embassy. Sison was an authority in family law while Ongkiko was one of the brightest legal minds in the country.
Bautista and his wife were doctors who had made their fortune while working in the United States for 17 years. Theirs was a case of a Filipino family living the elusive American Dream but for some reason, the couple and their four daughters all decided to move back to the Philippines.

A one-hit wonder?
During the interview, Pacheco and the other candidates seemed to speak of a parallel Philippines, one that could exist only in another dimension, with a kind of politics whose core was the Catholic faith, where candidates were willing to reject the pork barrel, and where elected officials were ready to be punished if they failed to deliver.
While the group engages Filipinos to change the way they thought about politics, it also invites media to reevaluate the way they generally covered the elections. Kapatiran wanted the media to take notice of other candidates who could be true alternatives to the tired administration-opposition formula.
After the initial article on Kapatiran, the group was in danger of being a “one-hit wonder.” Have one article published and that’s it.
Despite support from various Christian lay groups around the country, the organization lacks a political machinery. To this day, it has no media handlers and campaign strategists. This explains the lack of regular press releases that usually come from political parties and flood newsrooms and reporters’ e-mails everyday.
Truly, Kapatiran’s campaign strategy borders on the idealistic, if not the naïve. It relies on person-to-person campaigning with only occasional media reports and advertisements. It feeds voters with a recitation of its political platform, which is read from a scroll that the candidates literally carry with them during the rallies. Finances depend on individual pledges from symphathizers.
Having personally spent only P18,000 at that time, Bautista the physician managed to land on the 29th spot, not far from Pichay (24th) who had shelled out P33 million in TV ads alone.

Between Vatican II and Vilma
But despite the fever-pitch idealism of Kapatiran, the stories about it were not always deemed “newsworthy.”
Election coverage is still dictated by news value and this usually ignores political platforms, especially one that espouses Christian values. These days, religious matters become newsworthy only when Catholic Church officials engage in political commentary or when a priest fathers a child. How can a campaign rally that mentions things like Vatican II, the “empowerment of the laity,” “Deus Caritas Est,” and Pope Benedict XVI’s guidance on church and politics, attract more attention than Vilma Santos’s gubernatorial bid?
For a reporter covering groups like Kapatiran, the challenge then is to work much harder for a good angle. The story doesn’t always present itself. Often, it is buried under or around a heap of abstract pronouncements and the reporter must find it. n

Christian V. Esguerra  has been a reporter of the Philippine Daily Inquirer since 2000. He covered religion and health for two years before moving to the House of Representatives early this year.

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