The rehabilitation of the Marcos name will continue to rely on many factors; one crucial strategy is negation, the erasure of essential distinctions. Published in Rappler on May 31, 2022.
The day after Congress proclaimed him president-elect, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. held a news conference with only three news organizations in attendance. GMA Network, the country's largest, was one of the three invited; the others were the two religion-owned broadcasting channels favored by and partial to the Marcos presidential campaign, Net 25 and SMNI.
None of the other news organizations were invited. In fact, the Marcos campaign team issued an advisory that the BBM Media Center, where the selective news conference was eventually held, would "still be closed" that Thursday. The rest of Philippine media were left to scramble and follow the briefing on social media.
The news conference, the president-elect's first ever, was wrong on many levels. Let me highlight a troubling aspect of it that implements, and explains, a key Marcos Jr. communications strategy. By lumping the openly partisan SMNI and Net 25 with independent, professional GMA, the Marcos administration-in-the-making was continuing its attempt to legitimize the two other channels.
Or, to be more precise, it was continuing its long-term effort to erase any significant distinctions between news organizations like GMA (institutionally meek when it comes to press freedom issues, but the home of courageous, highly competent individual journalists and numerous prizewinning programs of high journalistic quality) and the Marcos propaganda infrastructure, including its nascent versions of alternate-reality network Fox News. In other words, the selective news conference was yet another attempt at flattening the discourse.
This is a signature Marcos strategy, which the recent elections placed in sharp relief.
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