Elections and the crisis of information

ELECTIONS ARE the only means through which an allegedly free people can delegate their sovereign powers of governance to leaders they can trust to enforce their will.

Electing the right officials isn’t the same as removing the wrong ones, whom they can oust through direct action, recall through a petition by 25 percent of the electorate, or impeach through Congress.

Direct citizen action has twice occurred in the Philippines in recent history, the first time in 1986 when a civilian-military mutiny removed Ferdinand Marcos from power, and the second in 2001 when Joseph Estrada was ousted in the aftermath of the failure of the attempt to remove him through impeachment.  In 2012 former Renato Corona was impeached and removed, but from the non-elective office of Chief Justice.  Only local officials have been recalled and by-elections subsequently held in some communities in the Philippines since 1986.

Removing officials isn’t the same as electing them, and none of the above options to correct electorate error would be necessary if voters chose their leaders carefully. The Philippine experience with EDSAs 1 and 2 may be a positive indication of the extent to which Filipinos are prepared to correct their mistakes at the polls. But it also does show how flawed their judgment had been.

The rest of the time when it’s not ousting dictators and incompetents,  electorate error is manifest in the corruption, inefficiency, and outright cluelessness of the people they’ve put in power, resulting in bad governance and the failure to address even the country’s most basic problems.  Making choices no matter how bad during elections may be the electorate’s right. But bad choices make for bad governance inevitable, and practically guarantee the persistence of problems that could otherwise be addressed.

Independently of such electoral issues as fraud, violence, intimidation and bribery, the bad choices the Filipino voter too often makes have been attributed to insufficient, distorted, or outright absence of accurate, reliable and more or less complete information. It’s a deficiency that leads to, among other consequences, citizens’ voting on the basis of name recall, or such entertainment rather than political values as the ability to sing and dance, and even physical appearance.

While the persistence of political dynasties and all its consequences limit electorate choices to candidates with whose names they’re already familiar, awareness of other candidates, and, even more importantly, the social, economic and other issues that need to be addressed and the policy options available can correct the dominance of the merely well-known but clueless.

Although the coverage of Philippine elections is far from perfect, the major players in Philippine media at least have implicitly recognized the inadequacy of their reporting by interviewing lesser known candidates, providing readers, viewers and listeners the track records of candidates, and/ or pressing them to commit to the adoption of policies on current issues.

At the community level, however, little has changed, with voters being besieged by candidates who publish newspapers for the duration of campaigns, buy radio stations outright, pay off local journalists for favorable coverage, finance blocktimers, or are blocktimers themselves. The affiliates of local networks are practically in default, because they’re unable or unwilling to provide the information that could temper the influence of bought and paid-for reporting and comment. The coverage of elections at the local level therefore remains  mostly incomplete, distorted and biased—or the exact opposite of  the informative, fair and reliable reporting that’s most needed.

The consequences are not limited to bad choices at the local level, in the offices of which warlords, members of political dynasties, the corrupt and even the criminal proliferate. The consequences also include making choices for national offices on the basis of assumptions drawn from the same misinformation, incomplete information, or lack of information that decide voter choices at the local level.

And yet the challenge to the media is most urgent at the local level, because it is where, in the first place, most of the voters are concentrated, and where the most relevant information is needed—but where, ironically in this country of ironies, the news media are failing to provide the information the voters need. The crisis of information during elections inevitably leads to the crisis of governance with which this country has been cursed.