Media coverage of elections

Although substantial improvement has happened in the last four elections, media coverage of the money flow during elections can be better. PCIJ’s own experience as well as interviews with reporters who have covered several national and local elections reflect longstanding challenges.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility’s (CMFR) election monitoring reports of the 2016 and 2010 presidential elections show that campaign finance does not get a lot of coverage in mainstream news. Campaign conduct in the last two presidential elections topped the list of themes covered by the news media.

“Dominated by reports from the campaign trail, the daily feed from the field failed to provide helpful information about the candidate,” the CMFR observed of the 2016 election coverage. “Embedded media clearly failed to get more facetime with the candidate, which they could have used to get deeper into issues.”

CMFR’s observation reflects the fact that key information on campaign finance are only made available post-elections or when the SOCEs are submitted. This leaves a big gap in terms of what reporters can track during the campaign period or when it matters the most. Reporters may check other sources such as networks or media monitoring agency Nielsen for advertising records, but these may be limited to give a full picture or a reliable account of a candidate’s spending. Donations are essentially a blackhole during the campaign period unless a candidate is forthcoming about such information.

Going back to the question as to why candidates use so much of their personal funds in order to convince people that they are worthy of the public’s trust, it has become more imperative for the media to report on campaign finance and wealth of public officials not only during the election period. Red flags should be triggers for sustained and deeper monitoring of transactions entered into by public officials either through their own business interests or their families’. In the same manner, scrutiny must be sustained as to the engagements of those who pooled funds for campaign kitties of candidates in public contracts.

Unfortunately, election watchdogs have observed that the interest of the media for election and election-related issues generally wanes or even stops at the time that candidates are proclaimed. In a training on election coverage organized by PCIJ in 2020, lawyer Rona Ann Caritos, executive director at LENTE, shared that the media practice in election coverage was to focus on events and processes including registration, filing of candidacies, campaign sorties, actual voting day, counting of votes, proclamation, and election protests.

But Caritos asserts that the media needs to look into the 2022 National and Local Elections with fresh lens and perspectives considering the many contexts that surround it including the pandemic as well as the first-ever elections in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. She pointed out that the media needs to familiarize itself with the electoral cycle map which divides the election period into three phases - pre-voting period, voting period, and post-voting period. More importantly, Caritos shared that the media should also shed light on other election issues including procurement, campaign finance, and participation of marginalized sectors especially indigenous peoples. 

Eric Jude Alvia, NAMFREL secretary general, shares this sentiment that while the media does well in calling attention to important election issues, it has failed to sustain election reporting. Based on NAMFREL’s observations, the media’s attention to election issues ends when reports are published, which signals the time to move on to the next story.

Even more fundamental, Alvia said the media has failed to relate election issues to the people. “It does not relate (election) violations to community or even personal impacts.” Alvia asserts that the question remains, “What’s in it for me? What is its relevance to me?”

But Alvia adds that this attitude is not only observed among the media and such is the case too with civil society organizations. He relates the experience of PAP consortium whose efforts could have been sustained even if the project has ended if only it was able to engage communities effectively. 

In the same context, the Comelec too has to step up in involving the citizens. Alvia says, “You cannot do it alone. When you want to do campaign finance enforcement efforts, you have to involve the citizenry.” 

Reporter experiences
 

Maria Elena Catajan, a reporter with SunStar Baguio who covered the 2004 and 2010 elections, said that access to information and to documents that can aid verification are primary challenges. For instance, checking certain projects that were finished and left unfinished by an administration is difficult to do because the local press couldn’t get documents even at the regional level. 

Philippine Star reporter Alexis Romero shares the same dilemma. Romero covered the United Nationalist Alliance in the 2013 midterm elections and the Liberal Party in 2016 national elections. As a reporter covering the president in the 2019 midterm elections, he also covered sorties organized by the PDP-Laban coalition. Most of the stories he wrote are deadline-based stories and profiles of candidates.

While Comelec reporters are knowledgeable about election laws, reporters covering the campaigns usually have a good idea of what is happening on the ground, says Romero. He says it is not unreasonable to assume that there would be more campaign finance stories if reporters covering Comelec and individual candidates work together to analyze the data. But this won’t be easy if access is lacking, he notes. Another question, he says, is whether campaign teams would be willing to provide truthful and timely information about their spending. 

Rappler reporter Michael Bueza, who has covered the 2013, 2016 and 2019 elections, has seen Comelec’s efforts to become more transparent and accessible to reporters and to the public. It remains to be seen whether this will be the same come the 2022 elections, with a fresh batch of commissioners, he notes.

One persisting pain point for Bueza is the pre-campaign strategy of many candidates. According to the Supreme Court, TV, radio, and print ads are generally not considered “premature campaigning,” hence tracking the expenses for these ads is difficult.

Bueza also counts the glitches, errors, and logistical roadblocks in the automated election system that emerge every election season as another set of challenges. “There is a need to explain to the public what these are, and whether these would adversely affect election results. The challenge is in converting these technical terms into digestible bits that readers can understand,” he says.

To be sure, the CFO has regularly shared, upon request, campaign finance documents of national candidates. Bueza says this has greatly aided their reporting, especially on identifying significant contributors of winning candidates. The challenge, however, is in the reporting of campaign expenditures of local candidates. Save for a few instances when candidates do overspend, there is minimal focus and exposure on reportage on how much local candidates have spent and received during the polls.

The CFO likewise releases scanned PDF copies of SOCEs; the processing and extracting the data from these files are time-consuming.

Beat reporters, local reporters as well as data or investigative reporters have different reporting needs, which are largely defined by their newsroom’s editorial agenda and how much time they have to complete a report. But the crux of the problem goes beyond individual reporters as the challenges they face are also rooted on the same issues faced by newsrooms in reporting other issues. Parallel to this experience, too, is the story of Comelec, which has been grappling with campaign-finance reforms amid outdated laws and meager resources.

The most challenging part, Romero says, is coming up with enterprise stories or those that go beyond the usual campaign rhetoric and self-promotion. “Reporters are often inundated with talking points and campaign teams make sure that journalists have more than enough material to write about so they won’t have time and energy to dig deeper,” he says.

There’s a pressure to come up with stories about information that are circulating in the social media even if they are not necessarily newsworthy. Sometimes, the domino effect, wherein a news outlet will do a story about something just because a rival reported about it – leads to waste of resources, time, and energy. 

Romero suggests that a team devoted solely to in-depth reports will be spared from the tyranny of real-time. They do not need to worry about deadline-based stories and they will have time for data crunching. Newsrooms will also benefit because it will allow them to offer something different to their audiences, not just the usual he said, she said reports. 

Catajan says that time, geography and financial constraints are among the issues encountered by the local journalists. She says newsrooms should form teams to focus on in-depth election stories like campaign finance. Beyond these, reporters need to understand better how to spot red flags in campaign finance reports. 

Bueza also says that newsrooms can help their staff understand campaign finance better by holding briefings with veteran election reporters and resource persons from election watchdogs. “This way, there is information sharing and healthy discussions on campaign finance monitoring. Stronger tie-ups with election watchdogs can also be of great help,” he says.