Presidential Communications Office Secretary Martin Andanar was in the spotlight recently.
Anti-administration critics scored the PCO for the conflicting statements certain Palace officials gave to the media regarding President Rodrigo Duterte’s participation at the recent Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Laos. Here, Duterte was supposed to sit down among the big names attending the summit.
After President Duterte declared a state of lawlessness in Davao City in response to the bombing incident there, several Palace officials gave the media conflicting interpretations of what the President had in mind when he made that announcement. One high-profile and controversial Palace legal adviser even tried to second-guess the President and publicly suggested that authoritarian times under a good leader can’t be so bad. As expected, critics blamed Andanar and the PCO for the disorganized dissemination of information from Palace officials.
The most recent controversy involves the Official Gazette, the repository of copies of all official acts and pronouncements of the national government. It is published by the PCO.
Several days ago, the Facebook page of the Official Gazette came out with a historical posting about the 99th birth anniversary of ex-President Ferdinand Marcos. The post stated that Marcos stepped down from power to avoid bloodshed during the so-called Edsa Revolution in 1986.
Netizens from the anti-Marcos camps, particularly the intolerant, judgmental extremists from ex-President Benigno Aquino III’s so-called “yellow army,” denounced the posting as an example of “historical revisionism” for the flimsy reason that they did not agree with it.
In appeasement, the PCO replaced the posting with entries about Marcos’s political career—his rise from congressman in 1949 to president in 1965.
Apparently because the amended posting was silent about the martial law period during the Marcos administration, anti-Marcos netizens denounced the amended posting and blamed the PCO.
Although Andanar refused to allow further alterations, the PCO still issued an apology. The apology notwithstanding, the “yellow army” partisans continued bashing Andanar and the PCO, and demanded that the writer of the posting resign from his job after the partisans discovered that the writer used to be a staff assistant of ex-Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos.
Critics also chastized Andanar for his supposed inability to compel other Palace officials to refrain from making misleading and conflicting statements to the media.
During the Senate hearing on the proposed PCO budget for 2017, Senator Franklin Drilon gave unsolicited advice to Andanar. Drilon suggested that henceforth, only the presidential spokesman should speak for and on behalf of President Duterte, and that Andanar should enter the picture only when the presidential spokesman is not around. Nobody else should speak for the President, Drilon declared.
Unfazed, Andanar informed Drilon that during the administration of President Benigno Aquino III, the communications team of President Aquino used and abused the Official Gazette by posting an endless array of the campaign activities and purported accomplishments of the pro-Aquino Liberal Party (LP) designed to improve the campaign chances of LP presidential bet Mar Roxas. Andanar’s statement was quite a telling and unsettling remark, considering that Drilon was a staunch ally of Aquino, and Drilon was and remains a top official of Aquino’s LP.
To avoid complications, Drilon dismissed the LP’s abusive behavior, said the past is the past, and urged that the PCO should simply return to the original mandate of the Official Gazette, which is to publish official acts of the national government.
In time, Andanar acknowledged that the performance of the PCO could use some improvement, and asked the public for a little understanding since he has been on the job for only less than 90 days.
The criticism from the anti-Marcos netizens and Aquino’s “yellow army” partisans eventually simmered, due mainly to the continuing drugs controversy haunting Senator Leila de Lima.
That notwithstanding, there is a need to set the record straight.
Unlike during the recent Aquino regime, the PCO is currently managed by Andanar, a young, professional broadcaster with no past political ties with the incumbent president. That’s an improvement from the old practice of getting a known political ally as the presidential spokesman. Moreover, since Andanar is from the media industry, Andanar has had no problem in dealing with the mainstream news media.
The problem lies not in Andanar but in President Duterte’s people who assume that they know the mind of the President simply because they are close to him. Many of them have no actual experience in dealing with the news media and think that a statement to the press is merely an opportunity to promote themselves to the general public. Worse, these people do not even bother to coordinate with either the presidential spokesman, or Andanar. As a result, contradictory statements, all purporting to embody the President’s views and policies, reach the media.
Sure, President Duterte can be unpredictable and ambivalent, and at times even impulsive. That fact, however, does not entitle the President’s opinionated and publicity-seeking cabinet secretaries to speak to the press on the President’s behalf.
Andanar cannot be expected to reprimand or muzzle cabinet secretaries who think their jobs include speaking for the President. Since Andanar holds the rank of a cabinet secretary, he knows that it is not in his place to give directives to his colleagues in the cabinet.
The bottom line is that cabinet secretaries who speak to the media should confine themselves to matters within their actual knowledge and concern, and refrain from hogging the spotlight and pretending to speak for the main man.
Traditionally, the media give the president a 100-day “honeymoon” within which he is expected to acquaint himself with his new job as the nation’s helmsman. During this period, the media are not too critical of the president. If the president is given that accommodation, the PCO head is entitled to one, too. After all, criticism against the PCO chief is akin to criticism of the president.