‘Scripted’ Protest: A Shaky Slant

JEERS TO ABS-CBN’s TV Patrol for a slanted report on an anti-APEC protest and for using social media posts instead of its own reporting to “validate” it.

In its November 24 newscast, TV Patrol aired an exclusive report by Chiara Zambrano showing a video clip of an anti-APEC demonstration last November 19. The report did not disclose the exact location of the protest scene but the clip showed protesters and the police outside the Darada Center at Gil Puyat Avenue corner Roxas Boulevard. This area is in the vicinity of the Philippine International Convention Center where top-level APEC meetings were being held at the time.

The report showed protesters in the front line explaining to the police the reasons for their protest. Some police officers were also seen using a water cannon and physical force against the rallyists. The footage then showed a clip of a policeman and one protester engaged in the following exchange:

Police: Tulakan lang tayo ah, tulakan!  (Let’s just push each other!)

Protester: Tulakan lang, media lang ‘to! Media projection lang kaya huwag kang a-ano! Saka ikaw, baka suntukin kita! *bleep* (This is just media projection so don’t do anything rash, I might punch you!)

The report then included the tweets of netizens who concluded that the protest was “staged” or “scripted.” Zambrano mentioned other instances of police and protesters agreeing to limit each other’s aggressiveness. She reported the following exchange during the same incident between the same policeman and protester:

Protester: ‘Wag ka na, wala nang susundot! Wala nang susundot! (No one  should take a stab at anyone.)

Police: Promise, promise. Wala na. (That’s all.)

Protester: Ganyan lang, ganyan lang. (That’s it. That’s it.)

Police: Oo, laro-laro lang. (Yes. Just a game.)

Police Chief Superintendent Wilben Mayor, in an interview with Zambrano, said the policeman in the clip was trying to keep things peaceful between the two parties, but that the protesters had revealed that their protest was just for show. Zambrano said she had asked Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), the organizer of anti-APEC protests, to explain what it thought is the media’s role in reporting public demonstrations. Bayan, she said, refused comment.

On November 26, Bayan secretary-general Carol Araullo published an open letter addressed to Zambrano and TV Patrol news editors. She said Bayan did not comment on the incident because the video clip used in the report was an exchange between an unidentified policeman and an unidentified protester. “By no stretch of the imagination can it be construed that the latter represents the position of Bayan,” she said.

“As to what importance Bayan gives to media coverage of protests, this is actually a no-brainer. Bayan tries as much as possible to get the dominant mass media to cover its protest actions for the plain reason that it wants its message to reach more people,” Araullo said.

While protests and how they are conducted are fair game for scrutiny by the press, the TV Patrol report could have shed light on the incident and its larger significance if it took a step further by investigating the exchange – the nature, the context — between the policeman and the protester. Were they just mocking each other? Were the two men just bantering? Were they just trying to defuse the tension? Unfortunately, the report did not indicate any attempt to do such a thing.

Instead of interviewing the two subjects to get to the bottom of the matter, TV Patrol turned to social media and use Twitter reactions to support what is now clearly a shaky slant. That may have given the story more legs in terms of including other voices but its effect is problematic and could prove insidious: the report was based on a seemingly unfounded premise that is later “validated” by tweets from netizens who did not know any better about what exactly was happening. And the thing is, TV Patrol should have known better.