Media as politics

POLITICS IS the never-ending story in the Philippine setting, where, as one election is concluded; the politicians are already building alliances and filling their war chests for the next one.  The elections of 2010 may have been over only 24 months ago, but preparations are already under way for 2013, when the electorate once more goes to the polls to elect 12, possibly 13, senators, members of the House of Representatives, and local officials.

Part of the reason is logistical, Philippine elections usually consisting of so many posts that need to be filled a year is hardly enough for the Commission on Elections to prepare for them. But of even more relevance is the Philippine political parties’ character as groups of individuals who usually don’t share a common program of government, much less a shared vision of where to take the country once they’re in power.  Every election in the Philippines is waged first and last at the personal level rather than at the institutional (party) or ideological plane.

This results in party memberships that are often as tenuous as the alliances of convenience various groups slap together each campaign period. It leads in turn to the need to reorganize political parties and forge new alliances in practically every election, which in the Philippines is usually every three years.  An election is also all about money, the number of votes one can get depending on such factors as his or her capacity to spend for advertising in various media including streamers, fliers, sample ballots, etc., holding rallies and campaigning in, as the Philippine media put it, “vote rich” areas, and on election day itself, paying election watchers, and feeding multitudes of campaign workers, sympathizers, and other hangers-on.

How much one can spend can make the difference between being declared a “nuisance” candidate or a “credible” one by the Commission on Elections.  Not only is one’s capacity to spend millions and even billions (one estimate puts the cost of running for President at P5 billion) decisive in making sure that only the moneyed can aspire for elective office, thus perpetuating the dynastic system; it also feeds into the corruption regnant in officialdom, where recovering one’s expenses and more has become an acceptable given.

But over the last two decades since actors and other celebrities began running for elective office,  which groups one can put together and how much one’s campaign chest can amass have come to depend at least partly on a politician’s media presence, which in turn depends on whether one can put together a media event the media will report on, follow up, and conduct interviews about–  or one’s capacity to contribute to media corruption by paying off individual practitioners and even entire media organizations to assure that presence.

Media presence is never so early that it can’t help advance one’s plans for national office. An early presence, preferably positive, puts the politician in the public mind; but it also suggests that he’s popular and is a likely candidate to bet on, which can mean so much more in terms of campaign funding.  A media event such as the forging of an alliance even among the (ideologically) unlikeliest groups can trigger early media attention on politics and politicians, despite the limits the law imposes on when one can campaign.  The presence can initially be sustained via stealth advertising (advertising that doesn’t look like advertising—i.e., in this case, campaign ads that don’t openly ask the reader/viewer/ listener to vote for the politician but which extols his virtues and/or focuses on his public advocacies), which by the time the official campaign period comes around, morphs into open solicitations for votes.

Philippine elections have been described as occasions for the distribution of wealth and as temporary boosts to the economy (by providing those involved in campaigns with spending money, and the unemployed jobs as campaign workers).  But they also help sustain the Philippine media, not only through open advertising,  but also through the  pre-arranged, public relations boosts, disguised as legitimate reports,  commentaries, and interviews with the politician who’s footing the bill, some practitioners and entire media organizations have mastered.

The link between Philippine media and politics has often been described as consisting of the political interests of those who own and control the media—interests that in some cases have included politicians themselves’ being media owners—and the impact  of those interests on  reporting, analysis and comment . It’s a pattern that goes back to the period of United States tutelage in the fine arts of ward politics, when the major political parties invested in their own newspapers  to help them win  the struggle for political power.  The pattern has basically held since. Politicians and future aspirants for political office do still own, or are currently in the market for media organizations, in full awareness of the power of the media, while those media owners who aren’t politicians do have their own political preferences their organizations disseminate every election period.

The persistence of this pattern of ownership helps explain why some newspapers, for example, continue to publish despite huge losses, and why certain network laggards in the ratings game can absorb huge losses. A newspaper   can be both sword and shield not only during campaign periods but also between elections, when it can at least keep a politician in the public eye and make his views known, or even paint him in larger than life dimensions just in time for the next campaign.   The economic viability of media organizations has become significantly dependent on the elections that are regularly held in the Philippines.  That makes profitability not really as important a factor in their survival as their political value.