Fact-checking or black propaganda?

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS         FEBRUARY 09, 2019

WHEN you claim to be a news organization worthy of your journalistic integrity, you publish news to inform people about facts, but not as part of a well-oiled black propaganda machinery aimed at bringing down a government or a candidacy.

News organizations, from ABS-CBN to GMA-7, from Inquirer to Rappler appear to have joined Vera Files in embarking on a systematic campaign to fact-check. Ideally, there is nothing wrong with this, considering that part of media’s role is to inform the public, and this would then necessarily include exposing lies and false claims.

However, fact-checking becomes suspect when it acquires a selective flavor, or when it is obviously aimed not at informing but to maliciously taint and destroy. It is even more problematic when this is done in the context of an election campaign.

Rappler, for example, is so fixated on exposing the false claim that Ilocos Norte Gov. Imee Marcos, who is running for senator, has a degree from Princeton University. It appears that Rappler is not contented in posting the result of its fact-checking just once but has since almost daily reposted it in its Facebook page. It is not the act of fact-checking Ms. Marcos that is the issue here, but the act of repeatedly reposting over and over again such information. A news organization of decent pedigree would leave it up to its readers to repost news and information that it publishes.

Rappler wants us to accord it the benefit of the doubt that it is doing this in good faith. But that would be difficult to grant when one also looks at Rappler’s record of telling the truth. No less than the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has found it to have lied about its ownership. It also now stands accused of lying about its taxes. It is problematic for Rappler to claim moral ascendancy to fact-check lies, when it keeps on sliming the government using its own bloated statistics about deaths related to the drug war. And now it has the audacity to repost over and over again the lie about a candidate against whom it has unashamedly shown to have a bias.

For all intents and purposes, this act of repeatedly reposting its fact-checking of Ms Marcos is clear evidence that Rappler has corrupted the act of fact-checking and turned it into a dirty tactic pursuant to a partisan agenda in an election season. It has weaponized fact-checking into becoming a propaganda tool to torpedo the candidacy of Ms. Marcos instead of simply informing the public about facts.

And Rappler is not alone in this.

Other news organizations have gone on an overdrive to fact-check even those that people who are familiar with photoshop would readily detect as false information. For example, the Inquirer had to seriously fact-check an image shared in social media about President Duterte holding a sign urging people in Mindanao not to vote for Mar Roxas. No person who is sane would even believe the veracity of such a post since it is obviously a meme.

As if this was not enough, GMA-7 even fact-checked what was obviously, and in fact was publicly known as a meeting of impersonators of President Duterte and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hong Kong.

Fact-checking a meme or an obvious impersonation is akin to fact-checking a satirical site like Adobo Chronicles. It is like taking seriously the jokes of hosts in a comedy bar. It is but common sense not to take these seriously, and anyone who does so unwittingly now becomes part of the joke.

But it seems that what drives these media organizations is less to propagate the truth, and more to simply hurt and demean. And the targets of their demolition are President Duterte, his loyal partisan DDS, and the Marcoses. Much as they would deny this, the evidence lies in the palpable selectiveness of their fact-checking.

Jover Laurio has been issuing her “resibos” based on incomplete information, yet she is barely checked. In fact, instead of a fact-check, she was even given an award recognizing her supposed courage to become, technically, also a fact-checker. Recently, one of Laurio’s “resibos” turned out to be fake, when she insinuated about that President Duterte had died. This fake news was reproduced in social media posts by anti-Duterte critics. Yet, we have yet to see any of the news organizations devote space in their websites putting a “fake” stamp on Laurio’s face to graphically dramatize the gaffe, in the same way Rappler has repeatedly reposted its fact-check of Imee Marcos’ false claim about her degree from Princeton.

The selectiveness is simply offensive. These fact-checkers are making it appear that the lies and misinformation are concentrated only in the DDS and the Marcoses, as the usual suspects. They let the lies and misinformation coming from Leni Robredo, the LP politicians, and their preferred political personalities go unchecked. They make it appear that making false claims is the monopoly of the pro-Duterte and pro-Marcos crowds. They do not even have the courage to fact-check Kris Aquino and her audacious claims, even as they have time to fact-check memes and satirical posts.

And what is even worse is when the fact-checkers nitpick and twist the information if only to squeeze out a lie from a claim, or to impute malice in vague information which is made to appear as a deliberate false claim.

For example, time and space were spent fact-checking claims made in social media about former senator Bongbong Marcos having had a part in the evolution of the free college education law, with the fact-checking media gleefully pointing out that the law was passed when Marcos was no longer a senator, and that he never filed a bill on the matter. This gave the impression that such claim was a lie. These fact-checkers failed to check that the then Senator Marcos made a public declaration of his support for such a measure during his term in the Senate. Thus, while Bongbong Marcos may not have been officially one of the authors and sponsors of the actual bill that became law since he was no longer in the Senate, the fact remains that the intent to pass such law was part of his legislative record.

And these fact-checkers do not even care to fact-check each other. They do not fact-check Maria Ressa’s denials about her taxes, and no one seem to even do their own investigative work on the actual ownership of Rappler. There appears to be some kind of a code of silence among journalists not to hit their own. But if this is the case, then what would be their moral ascendancy to act like truth warriors against President Duterte and the Marcoses if they can’t apply the same when it comes to their colleagues. Who will then fact-check them?

And the almost simultaneous fact-checking frenzy appears well-coordinated, leading one to suspect that this may be a well-funded operation.

Indeed, it could be said that Rappler and its cabal in other media organizations are giving fact-checking a bad image. They are turning it into a selective political weapon to undermine, diminish and slime. It becomes more atrocious when in the guise of truth-telling, they are doing it as black propagandists working to defeat candidate Imee Marcos.

https://www.manilatimes.net/fact-checking-or-black-propaganda/509019/