Columnists, Partisans and Conflicts of Interest
The anti-Villar columnists’ allegations were supported by a GMANews.tv report. The special report (“Villar’s Tondo roots were ‘definitely middle class’”, April 26) was based on a month’s research, which included finding information on the income of Villar’s father through his employment records, and interviewing seafood vendors who used to buy fish from Villar’s mother when she was still a seafood wholesaler. Its conclusion: the NP standard bearer’s family was technically middle class.
GMA 7 interviews with anthropologist Mary Racelis and historian Angelito Nunag also provided more context. Both pointed out that Tondo, a district of Manila central to its commerce and which has had a gated community as early as the Commonwealth period, is not as homogenously poor as Villar would make it appear.
Overall, Esposo et al. managed to demolish Villar’s claims to poverty, both through the force of logic as well as documentary evidence. In that sense they provided voters the necessary service of helping them sift fact from fiction. But the ties that bound these columnists to the Aquino campaign, and their continuing to write columns that contextually could not but be partisan, raised ethical issues nevertheless (see sidebar: When is a columnist too partisan?).
Not really ill
If Villar focused his candidacy on claiming that he was poor, on the other hand Aquino III launched his candidacy for President of the Philippines on an anti-corruption platform. His supposedly mediocre legislative record and his alleged use of his parents’ names to further his campaign were some of the issues thrown at him and which were eventually linked to the question of his competence. But it was a purported “psychiatric report” which openly questioned, for the first time, his mental health and capacity to run the country.
[…] Columnists, Partisans, and Conflicts of Interest by Luis V. Teodoro with research by Rupert Francis Mangilit and John Reiner Antiquerra […]
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