Columnists, Partisans and Conflicts of Interest
Butch del Castillo, in a Nov. 17 Business Mirror column, weighed in on the allegation that Aquino was autistic. He repeated accounts of Aquino III’s childhood based on an alleged account by an unidentified source who said that because of Aquino’s hyperactivity, he was attacked by the family dog when he was three years old, and his sister Kris had saved him from serious injury.
But Kris Aquino is 11 years younger than her brother, and had not been born when the incident allegedly happened. Other equally iffy allegations del Castillo repeated in the same column was that the young Aquino III had been sent to a special school.
The ties that bind
Most information on Villar’s I-was-poor story and Aquino’s mental state came from either the columnists or, whether confirmed or otherwise, from sources in the candidates’ rival parties. It seems hardly necessary to say that sources from the political parties are almost always self-serving. But some media organizations and practitioners were nevertheless taking these sources seriously.
Unlike the stories on Aquino’s mental state, the efforts to refute Villar’s I-was-really- poor story were backed by documents, context and a little bit of history. Villar himself confirmed the veracity of the documents columnists obtained.
It does not mean, however, that the columns that demolished Villar’s claims were written with no particular agenda in mind. The ties that bind columnists Esposo et al. and the Aquino and Liberal Party campaign machinery, which became clear to the public only after the elections when certain columnists admitted participation in the campaign or were appointed to various positions in recognition of their contribution to it, could have been reason enough for reader, viewer and listener skepticism.
[…] Columnists, Partisans, and Conflicts of Interest by Luis V. Teodoro with research by Rupert Francis Mangilit and John Reiner Antiquerra […]
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