How not to sell ‘good news’

During the weeklong stay of President Arroyo at the Baguio Mansion House until New Year’s day, one of the new game plans for 2006 that she and her top advisers came up with is to revitalize the Palace Communications group, or Com-group for short.

The head of the Palace Com-group is presidential spokesman and concurrent press secretary Ignacio "Toting" Bunye as chairman. Under the planned new setup, Bunye will be assisted by secretary on government media entities, Cerge Remonde, and Philippine Information Agency director-general Rene Velasco.

The Com-group is supposed to replace the Office of the Communications Director (OCD) which was previously headed by secretary Silvestre"Yongyong" Afable. This was after Afable resigned late last year from the Cabinet to concentrate fully on his tasks as chief peace negotiator with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The OCD, which the President created under an Executive Order (EO), however, has yet to be officially reorganized under the new Com-group setup.

The Palace communications group’s battle cry is to "sell good news" to the Filipino people. But selling good news should not necessarily mean to peddle false hopes or to show half-full rather than half-empty glasses to the people.

The Palace communications team was actually a loosely organized group of supposed experts in the field of communications, including those involved in one way or the other in the control and management of news that filter down to the government and private mass media entities. It used to have as members outgoing Presidential Management Staff Secretary Rigoberto Tiglao who will leave for Athens next month to assume his new role as Philippine Ambassador to Greece.

Himself a former newsman, Tiglao will definitely do his job to sell the Philippines as investment and tourist destination in this part of the world. Tiglao says there are about 30,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Greece who will also be his constituents for the next three years of tour of duty. We have a number of other former journalists turned diplomats now serving the country in various posts abroad. These include former press secretary and erstwhile editor of the defunct Daily Express Noel Cabrera who is our envoy to Romania; former Manila Standard editor-in-chief Andy del Rosario who arrived here last week for vacation to temporarily stay out of the cold winter month in Hungary; and former Malaya editor Antonio Modena who is our controversial envoy to Israel.

Selling good news about the Philippines before international audience abroad is not much hard work to do because foreigners are naturally un-biased to any partisan views. But the selling of good news to our fellow Filipinos here requires a lot of effort to convince them that there are really good things happening in our country.

For example, I’m sure not everybody knows that President Arroyo issued about a week before Christmas a memorandum order to the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) directing this state-owned banking institution to create a special window for private sector firms from which they can borrow funds for acquisition of buses they can use as transport services for their employees. I came to know about this presidential memo from Alex Aguilar, official spokesman of the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), who I heard being interviewed in radio yesterday. Aguilar welcomed this form of non-wage benefit that the Arroyo administration has offered to private sector workers pending action by the regional wage boards on salary hike petitions in various parts of the country. With public transport fares going up last year as the result of the series of gasoline price hikes, such transport assistance could very well help provide economic relief, especially to minimum wage earners.

I think the Arroyo administration has found a good model to this transport assistance scheme that I wrote last month in The STAR about providing our workers with air conditioned buses that ferry them from the company’s housing project in Laguna to our office in Port Area, Manila at subsidized fares. Through the initiatives of The STAR president Miguel Belmonte, our board of directors approved the acquisition of three additional air-conditioned buses last December which cost the company some P3 million in capital outlay investment. The STAR housing beneficiaries pay onlyP20 fare for this two-way trip. This bus fare is certainly much lower than the standard P69 one-way bus fare to Mayapa in Laguna, the nearest point to their housing site.

The provision of this DBP special funds window is certainly a brownie point for the Arroyo administration. Unfortunately, some people in the government, especially at the Palace where this presidential memorandum originated, did not even bother to make it widely known to its intended beneficiaries.

The Palace Com-group should also make an effort to be transparent in the appointment of new officials in the government. Take the hush-hush manner by which former Batangas Port customs collector Napoleon Morales was named as the new officer-in-charge at the Bureau of Customs vice deputy commissioner Alexander Arevalo. The appointment of Morales came to the knowledge of the public when he was already scheduled to take his oath of office before President Arroyo as newly promoted Customs deputy commissioner.

Finance Secretary Margarito Teves defended the appointment of Morales, since Customs is an attached agency to his office. This was in relation to the technical smuggling charges filed last year against Morales before the Ombudsman. The complaint against Morales was lodged by no less than Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Angelo Reyes as the head of the Task Force Anti-Smuggling (TFAS). The Ombudsman supposedly has already cleared Morales.

By the way, President Arroyo has "put on hold" Reyes as TFAS chief since June last year when she appointed Teves at the Finance Department to give the latter a "free hand" in running the various bureaus and offices under his control and supervision. The President formed TFAS under EO 385 she issued on Nov.16,2004. The relief of Reyes as TFAS chief was not as widely known when the President first gave this task to him at the height of smuggling incidents. But why keep this a secret?

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