The interview went well and my mom (who watched) said I was able to explain the concepts clearly. I told her it is how I taught my students in UP when I was still teaching that’s why I was able to break it down well. The point is, fact-checking is a good initiative but it doesn’t reach the masses, especially the rural poor. The D and E markets make up the bulk of the Philippine electorate and most of them do not have access to the Internet and so they do not have means to pay for data, or even a smart phone. Fact-checking only happens online and it has yet to reach the TV and radio—still the most accessible form of mass media in the Philippines.

As I said, media literacy teaches consumers of media messages how to be critical of the information fed by these entities and be conscious of the political economy involved there. Media ownership and their biases affect the delivery of the message and the content.

Like for example this tabloid; it is owned by the Romualdezes and everyone knows they are relatives of the Marcoses since Imelda is a Romualdez. It’s not surprising all the contents are anti-Leni Robredo and pro-Duterte. It features fake news (“hakot [crowd] for hire”) and all negative news about her campign/party.

Meanwhile, Manila Bulletin (which is known to support the establishment) tweeted an erroneous news because it echoed what Marcos’ team claimed. People on Twitter fact-checked the newspaper and said Las Pinas only has 600,000 citizens and how can half a million people—almost all of its citizens be at the rally?

Meanwhile, ABS-CBN published a third-party estimate of the number of people who actually attended the rally in Las Pinas, which in truth only reached 5,000

This is what I’m talking about why there is a need for media literacy. People should not be just mindless consumers of media. Misinformation and propaganda abound in traditional media and social media. Knowing how to be critical is important given democracy is at stake.

However, another hurdle to the critical thinking of consumers of mass media is the “echo chamber” effect that social media have on people, especially those who follow groups and “influencers/bloggers” who espouse disinformation and other lies (i.e. Thinking Pinoy, Mocha Uson, etc but of course I didn’t mention these names on air). I told the hosts this morning the challenge now is how to penetrate these echo chambers so the cycle of misinformation and propaganda can be broken. One of the things I said that could work are the methods employed in social marketing, especially the grassroots approach. I noted that this is one of the methods that the volunteers of one of the presidential candidates have been implementing such as door-to-door engagement of people on the ground, employing community participation in their information dissemination and marketing. Of course I cannot say it on air but we all understood each other that what I’m talking about was Leni. I told them about the AKAP principle (Awareness, Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice) and which form of communication could be more effective in this kind of social marketing that people must do during the campaign season and to fight misinformation and propaganda.

There were many points that I was able to share with them but it’s too long to write it down here.

This was shown live on the local cable TV channel and on FB Live.

Tomorrow I will be driving to Manila to attend an event and then probably work in Makati after. On Wednesday I would be having a call also with one of our Eastern European evacuee-reporter who will be put under my watch as they relocated to Southeast Asia. This would be challenging because of language barriers and the kind of market that he would be covering in the interim. This week is full of conferences and press briefings and I don’t know how I would be able to do much drawing in between.

Tonight I tried sketching cherry blossoms and a stray yellow bell or a similar flower to practice botanical watercoloring. It helps me control my brush and my heavy-handedness when it comes to coloring. Chinese botanical paintings are delicate so I need to do more of these. Drawing and painting tiny cherry blossoms are hard especially that I only devoted 5×8 inches of area in this watercolor paper.

I can do an entire series of this and give it to my mom. I put the one I did yesterday in one of my extra Ikea frames, so it would look neater to cover the watercolor smudges around the image. Hah. I can give this to my mom and the one on top when I go home maybe before Holy Week.

I should buy more frames. Hmmmm…