News5 interview with Aimee Marcos: Unmentioned family ties

ON JULY 4, News5 entertainment correspondent MJ Marfori reported on One Balita Pilipinas – a program of News5’s affiliate channel One PH – that she had done an exclusive interview with presidential sister Aimee Marcos. Marfori said that the younger Marcos, a social media strategist, had played a role in Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s campaign for the presidency. 

News5 promoted Marfori’s interview on all its affiliate channels. Marfori did a similar report on the same day on the primetime newscast Frontline Pilipinas, which gave it a lead headline. One PH’s evening talk program Sa Totoo Lang also carried the account, even adding a separate interview with Marfori herself. On English language affiliate One News, Marfori also gave a version of the report in the evening newscast, One News Now. 

Later the same day, the full 29-minute interview was uploaded on News5’s YouTube page.

The main interview and all the reports to promote it made no mention of Marfori’s family connection to her subject. Marfori, a show business reporter, was quoted in an article posted in entertainment website PEP.ph in 2020 that she and Aimee Marcos are half-sisters.

CMFR does not usually include entertainment news for monitoring as the practice of covering entertainment seems all oriented toward promotion of shows, performers, artists and celebrities – in other words, public relations. The interview with Aimee Marcos however entered the political field. She is not just a member of the President’s extended family; she had played a role in the social media campaign, which used historical revision and disinformation in the creation of various narratives, helping win support that raised Marcos Jr. to the presidency. 

The case involves more concerns that cannot be dealt within this Jeer. For now, we question a specific editorial decision. 

The conflict-of-interest issue should have led News5 to either assign someone else to do the interview, or not to do it at all. At the very least, Marfori should have been instructed to disclose the relationship before the interview as well as mention it in the different reports she did to promote it. 

Keeping the family ties unmentioned is bad practice even in show business news.