IT turns out that the
fakest “fake news” ever reported in recent memory is a photo.
This is the front-page
photo in the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s July 24, 2016 issue showing pedicab driver
Michael Siaron’s lifeless body being cradled in a Pieta-like pose by his
partner. Siaron, the newspaper claimed,* was executed by the police in the
course of President Duterte’s war against illegal drugs. The photo went viral
on the internet, with Western newspapers publishing it on their own front
pages.
Its impact was such on
the public mind that to paraphrase that newspaper adage, a single fake photo is
worth a thousand black propaganda articles. If Duterte didn’t have the massive
political support he had at the time and today, I think that single photo would
have created such an outrage against his presidency. *
The Inquirer actually
tag-teamed with the news website Rappler in this conspiracy to stop the war vs
illegal drugs. The website manufactured in September that fake data that at the
end of that month, the police had “extra-judicially” killed 7,080 illegal-drug
industry suspects, a figure that has been totally debunked.
It turns out now, after
more than a year of police investigation, that the pedicab driver was killed by
a drug syndicate’s assassin, one Nesty Santiago, who was also responsible for
five other killings. The unique scratches – like fingerprints – on the bullets
that murdered Siaron matched with the gun used by the killer, recovered when he
was killed in December.
Did the police invent
this explanation? I don’t think so, or it could have fabricated that story at
the height of that “Pieta” photo’s virality. Why would it come up with such an
explanation, when the Yellows had clearly failed, going by the polls, in their
campaign to portray the country as having been turned into a killing field
because of Duterte’s war against illegal drugs?
It is an understatement
to say that the PDI had gone to town last year with that photo and sensationalized
it to the hilt in its efforts to portray Duterte’s campaign as resulting in
ruthless, “extra-judicial” killings. *
Heart-rending photo
I can’t remember any such heart-rending, dramatic photo hogging half a newspaper’s front-page. The layout was intended to be a screaming poster, with a headline under it in the biggest font permissible in a newspaper: “Church: Thou shall not kill.”
I can’t remember any such heart-rending, dramatic photo hogging half a newspaper’s front-page. The layout was intended to be a screaming poster, with a headline under it in the biggest font permissible in a newspaper: “Church: Thou shall not kill.”
That front page was the
work of a master propagandist intent to bring Duterte down, calculating –
mistakenly – that he or she could use Filipinos’ Catholicism to create outrage
against the President.
A young man killed in
Duterte’s war was in a picture echoing Michaelangelo’s Pieta (“pity” in
Italian), which is one of the most iconic depictions of the Virgin Mary: the
Mother cradling the dead body of her son Jesus Christ.
If still you didn’t get
the message that it is God himself in his mysterious ways who is asking you to
be outraged at Duterte’s war vs drugs, the PDI put a huge headline under the
photo: “Thou shall not kill”. The headline really had nothing to do with the
photo, and didn’t, by any journalistic standards, deserve to be a headline, as
it was merely the title of a message of the Archbishop of Manila on the
occasion of Duterte’s scheduled first SONA. No matter, it emphasized what the
PDI editors wanted to convey. *
(In another
demonstration of its usual editorial policy, the PDI buried this recent story
on who really killed Siaron in its inside pages—I couldn’t even find it in its
internet version—when its report last year that he was killed by the police was
on its front page with the huge photo, followed up another article in which the
photographer Raffy Lerma boasted about his viral photo. For that photo, the
Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, funded by the American National
Endowment for Democracy, conferred on Lerma an “Award of Distinction.”)
Not even in their
wildest dreams perhaps did the drug lords think that they could have such a PDI
photo help them enormously in their project to stop through public opinion
Duterte’s war against them. A crudely written placard had been left beside the
tricycle driver’s corpse that read: “Pusher ako, huwag tularan (I’m a pusher,
don’t become like me).” It was obviously intended to pin the blame on the
police or on vigilantes supporting the police.
Scheme
I had always suspected that there may be such a scheme as in the past every time some local official—often the Manila and Pasay mayors—launched an anti-illegal drugs campaign, there would be such killings, with that kind of placard left beside the corpses. The mayors often would quietly end their campaign, almost always after such photos of an alleged summary execution by police would appear in the newspapers, as they were blamed for the killings by human rights NGOs and even by the clergy. *
I had always suspected that there may be such a scheme as in the past every time some local official—often the Manila and Pasay mayors—launched an anti-illegal drugs campaign, there would be such killings, with that kind of placard left beside the corpses. The mayors often would quietly end their campaign, almost always after such photos of an alleged summary execution by police would appear in the newspapers, as they were blamed for the killings by human rights NGOs and even by the clergy. *
One would be naïve,
though, or an unthinking supporter of Duterte, to insist that there have been
no summary executions of illegal-drug suspects by the police.
As I have written in
several columns before, summary executions by the police have been going on
perhaps since the birth of our modern Republic. This is so because the police
are exasperated by the capability of criminals, especially those backed by rich
and powerful drug lords, to escape justice because of our slow and often
inutile court system. Many policemen even fear that criminals they have
arrested, after they are freed on bail, will get back at them, even kill their
families.
It isn’t a situation of
course in which a policeman decides for himself who to kill or not. There has
been an unwritten rule that the ones killed are those known to be incorrigible
drug pushers, brutal killers, and rapists. In most cases, it is the chief of
police of a city or town, and then the precinct commanders, who would
implicitly send the message to what extent he is willing to tolerate summary
executions of known criminals. In police precincts in the most crime-infested
areas of the city, it has even been a practice for a rookie policeman to be
“initiated” and made an accepted member of the police brotherhood by requiring
him to kill a known “incorrigible” criminal. *
Horrible? Of course. All
of us wish we had a perfect world, a smoothly functioning justice system. But
there just isn’t, and Duterte knows this when he launched his war against
illegal drugs, which he thinks would save the country millions of lives in this
and coming generations.
The role of the
President though would be to exhort the police, of which he is ultimately the
commander in chief to follow the rule of law, yet at the same time rally them
to execute the war vs illegal drugs. As the Filipino term that is difficult to
translate would put it: “Bahala na sila to balance the two orders.”
*To be accurate, the PDI
in the article that accompanied the photo did not blame the police, reporting
only that the pedicab driver was killed by “two men riding on a motorcycle.” It
was the photographer Lerma who would write four days later, referring to the
victim: “It was the third extra-judicial killing of suspected drug pushers that
I covered on the graveyard shift last week.” Extra-judicial killing is defined
as executions by the police or other state agents of suspected criminals
without the sanction of a court.
The article was written by Mr. Rigo Berto
Tiglao, of the Manila Times titled “Fakest ‘fake news’ was viral Inquirer photo”
which was published October 23, 2017.
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