A scoop flavored Garci

The reappearance of former elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano on Nov. 27 before national television after hiding for five months was the latest twist in this political saga that has gripped the nation – as well as the press – since June.

The reemergence of Garcillano, whose voice figured in the controversial “Hello, Garci” tapes, ensured continuous press coverage of the issue. Among the first news organizations to interview Garcillano were ABS-CBN, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, GMA-7, and The Philippine Star.

Interestingly, media organizations that interviewed the former poll official first in late November all trumpeted that they got a scoop. ABS-CBN’s Nov. 27 report was labeled an “exclusive” by the network. The Inquirer said it was able to get an exclusive interview with Garcillano in its Nov. 28 banner. The Star also published in its Nov. 28 front page a photograph accompanying the banner story on Garcillano showing the paper’s reporter and the poll official in an “exclusive” interview somewhere in Mindanao on Nov. 27.

Others in the press noted how media were “led by the nose” by Garcillano. “The reality is that even as newspapers and TV news programs have been trumpeting their ‘scoops’ and ‘exclusives’ based on interviews with Garcillano, they were actually being led by the nose,” the PCIJ posted in its blog. These interviews were carefully orchestrated for Garcillano to achieve maximum media exposure, it said.

For Star columnist Marichu A. Villanueva, Garcillano just used the media to get his story across. “Obviously, Garcillano misled his media interviewers that it was ‘exclusive’ when he met with each of them separately these past few days and held it in unspecified places around his home province in Cagayan de Oro. ““So how can you trust the words of this person who wants to please everybody with ‘exclusive’ stories only to find out he was telling all these media interviewers the same things anyway,” she explained. ###

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