By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Spending the past week watching the “presidential interviews” has given me a fresh perspective of issues concerning our country. I wouldn’t say it swayed my decision on who to vote for as president on May 9, but there were some truly impressive answers given by a couple of other candidates I didn’t pick.
For this, I commend GMA-7’s Jessica Soho, ABS-CBN’s Boy Abunda, and the radio anchors of DZRH for the interviews and encourage all Filipinos to give these one-on-one encounters their time before lining up at polling precincts to cast their ballots.
I tend to disagree with certain political experts who criticized the pettiness of some questions as “cute but irrelevant.” In my view, some icebreaker questions were necessary to get a glimpse of a candidate’s character and disposition.
The candid responses you want from them are the same when interviewers confront them with controversies that have damaged their reputation. It’s a chance for them to wipe their faces clean by coming to terms with the truth or lying through their teeth.
Reading off netizens’ comments, I’d agree with those who claimed that one or two candidates did shine the brightest in these interviews. But I wouldn’t assume anyone “won”; it wasn’t a debate in the first place.
The correctness of each one’s answers is mostly relative to the audience’s view. It ultimately depends on the candidate’s ability to put it into action to prove his or her point. In this sense, of course, we all would side with the candidate we are rooting for. I did.
On netizen complaints against the time limits and the spliced responses to fit the airtime, I believe these were a necessary nuisance to ensure each presidential aspirant had equal time. This is evident if you watched the edited bits of these interviews available on YouTube.
Due to Abunda’s format, the piece-meal videos of his interviews on YouTube naturally had varying numbers of views per candidate. The candidates with more views appeared to be the ones more interesting to the public when the whole exercise was not meant to be a popularity contest. The same goes for the entire episodes of the DZRH interviews.
In this sense, Soho’s format might have been more effective in giving viewers what they needed – a moment of truth to compare and decide – as its video segments on YouTube were question-based in which all the candidates were able to answer. It serves not only the interest of the undecided but even those who might have blindly chosen their candidates without really knowing what they stand for.
In the future, putting our presidentiables on the hot seat could be improved. I would suggest a debate in which they are all present at the same time, answering tough questions live and not pre-taped – very much like the one pulled off by partnering media organizations in 2016.
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