By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Should it surprise anyone that the incoming administration is opening its doors at the Malacañang press room to vloggers?
Incoming press secretary Trixie Angeles announced last week that giving President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s favored vloggers media accreditation was on her “to-do” list.
For a well-oiled, long-planned, and deeply planted campaign on the world wide web that fetched “Mister Junior” over 31 million votes on election day, why wouldn’t he want his social media Smurfs covering his presidency?
“Papa Smurf,” after all, is a vlogger himself, and a village full of media friendlies would best serve his true-blue agenda.
Take note that in this sense, we’ll have to check if the operative word is “coverage” or “cover-up” of happenings in the Palace. That is a fair question, given Bongbong’s propensity to avoid what his camp perceives as “hostile media” during the campaign period.
If he sticks to that evasive character when he stands on the podium as the most powerful leader in the country for the next six years, the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) might as well be an attached agency of the Presidential Security Group (PSG).
But the media’s role, my friends, is not to protect the life of anyone’s presidency. In fact, media is an instrument of the people to hold government and the ones who run it – including and especially the president – accountable.
It must be emphasized that Firing Line does not intend to be condescending to social media personalities and vloggers whose media mileage may well surpass ours in mainstream media.
I afford them my utmost respect for standing by their own opinions and amplifying political and social issues that would have otherwise kept the public in the dark and not seek other sources for deeper, more accurate truths.
But such a move from such a president and such a PCOO secretary buoys suspicions that the real intent is to bring in a battalion of BBM die-hards to dilute professional media enterprises from delivering the real stories to the public.
Like the government, the media is a public trust; the fourth estate, a watchdog known to be the purveyor of truth because of its faithfulness to the story so that the public gets the unpolluted facts.
Press Secretary-designate Angeles very well knows how the young Duterte administration brought in a vlogger in the PCOO ranks and how that played out. It was a series of fumbles that consumed half the time of the PCOO explaining against ridicule instead of reporting on the President.
Friend and former ABS-CBN broadcast journalist Charie Villa drew flak last week when she posted “beware” on her Facebook page that featured an unverified list of vloggers who are supposed purveyors of fake news. A horde of them are BBM bootlickers. We’ll see if they start covering the Palace presscons by July.
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