I would like to congratulate Ms. Glenda Gloria, Ana Maria Tabunda and Carmela Fonbuena and their colleagues at Newsbreak magazine for an interesting, informative and important book. In these days of an on-and-off fiscal crisis, it is comforting to know that some professionals like the authors are always on when it comes to addressing critical public issues. And media’s role in determining which candidates win elections is certainly one such critical public issue. I would like to make four points on this issue from the perspective of public policy.
1.Media effort, specifically paid media as distinct from free media, altered candidate rankings and influenced electoral outcomes. That is what the book says. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? To my utilitarian self, it depends on the eventual performance of the winning candidates. FPJ spent on media and lost; GMA spent on media and won. Mar Roxas spent on media and became number one senator. John Osmena also spent on media and did not make it to the magic twelve. Are these outcomes good or bad? It depends on whether GMA turns out to be a good president or Mar Roxas a good senator. Fortunately or unfortunately, we will never know how FPJ or John Osmena would have turned out if they had been given their respective tenures in public office. I tend towards the view that an electoral contest is really ultimately a proxy for candidates’ ability to lead. If a candidate is smart enough, energetic enough and has access to resources enough to be lucky enough to mount an effective campaign and win, he or she might arguably have the intelligence, determination, and savvy to lead the nation in an elective position. Use of paid media is simply one of the tools our laws have made available for candidates disposal. The book offers many good and useful lessons about the use and misuse of this tool.
2.I am also of the view that the more information provided to voters in an electoral exercise the better for a democracy. We must be particularly sensitive to the situation we create for the average Filipino voter who may only have the means of less than elementary graduate competencies for dealing with a decision he knows is important but involves too many candidates in a contentious, confusing and complex information climate. Americans only had to choose between two contrasting candidates. Filipinos had to choose among five candidates each one trying to sound similar to, rather than different from, each other. So to me, the more information we make available to voters the better, even if that information were biased, puffed up, downright false or subtly slanted. I say let voters beware. And the book offers many insights indicating that our voters, within their constraints, are trying to be discerning as best as they can.
3.To me, the crucial issue, which is exacerbated but not entirely created by allowing candidates to buy media for campaigns, is balancing the escalating costs of elections relative to the quality of electoral outcomes and the role of media in this balancing through both its free and paid parts. I believe the best focus of any regulatory public policy must be on the levels and sources of campaign financing, rather than on the uses of campaign funds or behavior of players in a political campaign. I do not think regulating media’s behavior during political campaigns is a productive focus of public regulation. What I humbly suggest is that it makes for sound public policy to contain the total costs of elections while providing voters with ample information to decide among the candidates. Excessive spending on elections is bad for our economy, because such spending will not increase total wealth but merely redistribute existing incomes, and also bad for our politics, because such spending will eventually be repaid through bad governance. We need to set reasonable levels for allowable total campaign spending and then we need to enforce such levels on all candidates. It is possible to do that if we require all candidates to file a statement of assets and liabilities for their campaigns with their candidacies and then to set up monitored bank accounts through which all campaign expenses should flow and making other expenses not paid out of these accounts illegal and grounds for disqualification. How hard can it be for us to extend our money laundering regulations to monitor and control campaign expenses? Within these spending caps equitably enforced, candidates can then compete on the basis of best use of constrained resources. It is impossible to level the playing field among candidates if we are unable to level the playing field for all citizens. Some people will always be richer, smarter, more famous and better connected than others. The issue is always which among these rich, smart, famous and connected people should we choose from to lead our country. We should therefore level the playing field among these competing few.
4.Whoever wins elections will eventually prove himself in office. What we should collectively desire from our elections is not a specific winner of our choice because such a desire will be impossible to meet in any partisan election. Instead what we should all desire is that elections deliver a definite decision behind which the nation can unite (truly a “Hatol ng Bayan”) and the elected government consists of a group of elected leaders with a mandate to govern towards specific directions voters had clearly and knowingly affirmed from the competing claims in the campaign. From these criteria, the last elections did not yield a desired outcome. Significant segments doubted the validity of the results and no clear specific national direction was defined by our election results. A large part for this failure must be the accountability of Comelec. It is truly disappointing that as a democracy, which was born at the Edsa revolution against a stolen election, we have singularly failed to consistently secure for ourselves the services of a competent, credible and committed Comelec. I can only conclude that a discredited, incompetent and unreliable Comelec is actually useful to our incumbent politicians who benefit from these institutional weaknesses in the constitutionally mandated referee of our elections. While media may have profited from its commerce in the last elections, it will still be punished as an economic enterprise over the long-term by the limits and constraints to our country’s economic growth that a government with a weak mandate can hardly make possible.
Thank you and good morning.