The GMA Network anchors and its reporters — save for some snide remarks by a guest commentator on her take of senatorial candidates who appear to have won the polls, but whom obviously she did not care for.
To cite an example, even as the top six senatorial candidates are fairly sure winners, she comes up to state that there were so many “good” candidates who should have won, not those who have not done anything.
There was too, the clear offensive remark from this guest commentator who made a crack about the Marcoses winning the race in the senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial race, dredging up the old issues that had been at the forefront in 1986.
Still, hers was clearly reflective of the attitude of the usual civil socialites, who without a doubt, will be around Sen. Noynoy Aquino, just as they surrounded his mother during her presidency.
There were other remarks too, from one or two GMA anchors, saying that perhaps the people have forgotten Senate President Juan Ponce-Enrile’s martial law role under Ferdinand Marcos, as well as the remark of one who said there was new generation of voters who have forgotten the past.
Why can’t these civil socialites ever keep the past alone? One of the reasons we have never progressed as a nation is the fact that our leaders keep on harking back to the past instead of going forward.
Martial law was decades ago. Why keep going back to it? We would have gone from a dictatorship to a strong democracy too, if the same civil socialites did not destroy democracy when they mounted the coup d’etat against a popularly elected president — and all because they did not like him, and wanted one of their kind to sit in power.
And even then, despite the corruption and transactional politics that their anointed engaged in, they kept silent, because Gloria Arroyo was their president. And chances are, the same will occur again, with silence reigning again, should their anointed be proclaimed.
On the media coverage of GMA-7, it wasn’t just the hologram presentations featured in its coverage of the polls that its coverage was better. It was the network not being perceived by the public as being too partial on certain national candidates.
ANC, and presumably, ABS-CBN, were clearly a disappointment as up till the last minute, their stations’ plugs featuring celebrities were clearly partisan even if they did not mention any candidates’ names.
But the message was clearly in favor of presidential candidate, Noynoy Aquino, as the message was focused on change — which is the campaign spiel of Aquino.
Even the ANC anchors tended to favor Aquino, during the coverage.
Then too, there never was a doubt that the TV network did its all to push the Aquino candidacy throughout the campaign period — official and otherwise.
Ads from a rival candidate were bumped off, and its preffered presidential candidate’s ads — which was a circumvention of the number of ads that can be put up by a candidate — were all over its airlanes.
For a media entity, ABS-CBN lost a lot of its credibility as far as impartiality in a media establishment went, because it clearly favored one candidate much too blatantly, even in past coverages and programs to the point of bringing out the negatives in rival candidates while showing only the positive news about Aquino.
GMA-7 at least, in the election coverage, did not appear to favor any one national candidate, which should be the norm in such election coverages. But both networks, along with the PPCRV, failed in responsibly releasing the precinct count, without, however, saying from where these precincts come from, thus trending the results.
