IT's been more than a week since Cathy Binag, former partner of Antonio Floirendo, disclosed in a widely watched YouTube channel of popular "vlogger" Maharlika that the banana magnate's close friend, now President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was a regular cocaine user. Binag disclosed that Marcos even had a small circle of friends — that included billionaire Iñigo Zobel and now Special Assistant to the President Antonio Lagdameo Jr. — who regularly had cocaine-snorting sessions, even at the Marcoses' Forbes Park mansion.

Yet Philippine mainstream media, mainly the six big Manila-based broadsheets and tabloids, as well as the biggest broadcast outfits and the US-funded internet-only news outfit have totally ignored this explosive story that reveals the character not only of President Marcos but also his innermost circle of friends since his college days. Mainstream media have not published nor broadcast a single news article, not a single opinion column.

Even self-styled guardians of press freedom, especially the US-funded media outfits like Vera Files, Rappler, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility are exposed as minions by this Binag exposé. They have been totally silent on this issue. Why? Because Marcos is a certified puppet of the US, and these entities can't defy the American hand that feeds them. ABS-CBN's Karen Davila, whose "Head Start" program has focused on one-on-one interviews, and featured and interviewed hundreds of less newsworthy personalities, would have begged to interview Cathy Binag. She didn't. In fairness to Davila, that "don't" order would have come from the very top.

Marcos' father, the late dictator, would have admired the obedience of Philippine media in suppressing an exposé that could be a body blow to Marcos' popularity. And this was done without the legal instruments of martial law, through the self-censorship by mainstream media — because of fear, expecting favor or through funds in envelopes.

Marcos refuses to take the so-called hair follicle test that has been proven to be the most reliable method of determining cocaine use. But this test determines regular cocaine use only over the past three months. Binag was witness to Marcos' cocaine use only when he was a senator, or from 2010 to 2016. Marcos would logically refuse a test that determines drug use in the last three months, only if he has continued his addiction to this day. His cocaine drug addiction inconvertibly means a serious health condition that makes him unfit for the presidency.

Binag

We should thank Binag not only for exposing the cocaine-debauchery of the first family — she reported that the first lady had offered her cocaine while two of their three sons were also into the drug — but for indirectly revealing Marcos' tight control over Philippine media. Marcos already controls the House of Representatives through his cousin, Speaker Martin Romualdez. I suspect Senate President Francis Escudero's distancing himself from Marcos is all for show: His father, Salvador, was one of the dictator's most loyal officials. Escudero would most likely support Marcos — when he makes a bid for his clan to continue in power — more enthusiastically than his predecessor Miguel Zubiri. As we have seen in the ouster of Chief Justice Renato Corona, control of the media and Congress are the only two things the executive branch needs to control the country and shatter democracy.

Such control has become an existential requirement for the Marcos clan. After two years, he has inarguably been a bad president, even our worst, buoyed to remain in power by the US and media. His US-prodded belligerence toward China, the economic superpower in Asia, will bring us to ruin. Doesn't he ever wonder why among Asean's 10 members, it is only the Philippines that is hostile to China?

Marcos' strength — US support — could wane, however, as that superpower is getting increasingly embroiled in the Israeli genocide and the Ukraine-Russia war. These two conflicts, in fact, have forced the US Congress to ignore Marcos' pleas for a $500 million economic and military in "in appreciation" for the Americans' rotational bases; instead it increased their financial support for Israel and Ukraine. Marcos is very unlucky in that he decided to be a US puppet when the puppeteer is in decline as a superpower and can no longer give him substantial support.

The Marcos clan has little chance of perpetuating itself in power, except by amending the Constitution and by installing a parliamentary government in which he, or his cousin, becomes prime minister. This project requires the complete control of the media and Congress.

Not surprising

That Marcos could control the media is not that surprising really, since mainstream media has evolved since the fall of the dictatorship in 1986 from an institution in which idealist, dreamy-eyed journalists saw themselves as democracy's bastions and mostly autonomously run their outfits. Media now is tightly controlled by elites who are more than willing to cooperate with their fellow elites controlling the government and who don't really care about press freedom.

Two examples this column space can accommodate. The Philippine Daily Inquirer was initially an anti-dictatorship weekly paper, set up by personalities enraged by the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., such as Eugenia Apostol, Max Soliven, Louie Beltran and Betty Go-Belmonte. Quite weirdly, Aquino Jr. became the paper's saint of sorts; its editorial staff followed whatever political position his widow Corazon adopted, including the view that the communists were merely freedom fighters and not armed rebels.

Letty Magsanoc, a former features writer who was kicked out of her job in the magazine Panorama for writing an article critical of Marcos, would be the paper's editor-in-chief for 24 years, the indisputable big boss who ensured that the Aquino line was strictly adhered to. The Rufinos (its longtime publisher Marixi's family), the paper's elite owners, had operated Manila cinemas as well as the Makati Mile Long property that Imelda Marcos ordered a government agency to lease to them for decades at an atrociously cheap rate. The Rufinos, however, gave Magsanoc total control of the paper, since after all, it had become their huge cash cow in its heyday.

However, the steep rise in newsprint prices (the biggest cost for a newspaper), President Estrada's call to his billionaire friends not to place ads in the newspaper, President Duterte's move to wrest the lucrative Mile-Long commercial center away from the Rufinos took a heavy toll on the paper and the Rufinos' financials. A year after Magsanoc died in 2015, the Rufinos took full control of its editorial. It even dropped the paper's original slogan "Without Fear or Favor" that projected its crusade to expose corruption in government — a signal to stop fighting the government. The paper is even afraid of ever losing control of its editorial side by not appointing an editor-in-chief, with an "Associate Publisher" competing in power with an "Executive Editor." There will be no more powerful editor-in-chief like Letty Magsanoc in the Inquirer the Rufinos have ensured.

Entertainment

Thus from its proud role as the paper that determined public discourse, Inquirer's attraction to readers now is its entertainment and property sections. Its once-feared editorial section has been reduced to one page with its columnists writing innocuous pieces as their grappling with the difficulties of old age or at the other extreme, the anxieties of young adulthood. The Inquirer's public address system for championing press freedom — which had worked overtime during Estrada and Duterte years — has been dismantled.

Marcos' direct media network would include the Manila Standard, which is owned by House Speaker Martin Romualdez. Martin's brother Philip is also the husband of Alexandra Rufino-Prieto, who runs the Inquirer.

Set up mainly by Max Soliven and Louie Beltran, columnists popular before Marcos closed down the press in 1972, the Philippine Star has overtaken the Inquirer as the biggest broadsheet. The Belmonte family, which had originally bankrolled the Philippine Star and whose patriarch Feliciano had been Quezon City mayor and then-speaker of the House of Representatives, sold the paper in 2014 for P4 billion to the First Pacific Group, through its media arm (through PLDT) MediaQuest, which also owns the biggest broadcast network TV 5 as well 22 percent of the Inquirer. First Pacific has tightly controlled the Philippine Star not only through its corporate structure but to the fact that the chairmen of its board were both members of holding company First Pacific Co. Ltd.'s board — first, Ray Espinosa, Pangilinan's longtime counsel, followed by Victorico Vargas, one of his favorite executives at PLDT.

Our ambassador to Washington, Jose ("Babe") Romualdez, told me he owns substantial shares in the Star. Romualdez's open bias toward the US and his belligerency toward China explains why the newspaper has become basically the main propaganda sheet for the American lies in the South China Sea dispute, with its daily messaging directly coming from Washington. Among the other industries it is in, First Pacific has become since 2014 the country's biggest operator of toll roads that are the subject of labyrinthine government regulations. Only the other week, it bought the remaining government shares in NLEX Corp.

Insult

The Philippine Star is an insult to our Constitution, which bans foreigners from controlling media entities, even a single peso of investment. It is controlled through several layers — from MediaQuest to PLDT to First Pacific in Hong Kong — by the Indonesian magnate Antoni Salim. While portrayed as owning First Pacific and its Philippine operations, Salim's man running his firms, Manuel Pangilinan, owns only 1.5 percent of the shares of the two entities, an amount which only minimally increased since he joined the holding company in 1981.

The Manila Bulletin has largely been a pro-Marcos paper and supports whatever administration is in power. This is its institutional DNA as it was the only newspaper that wasn't closed down when Marcos imposed martial law in 1972.

This is, of course, quite understandable: While the Swiss shipping-industry magnate purportedly was the biggest stockholder, Marcos was the real owner of the shares. Another shipping magnate, the late Emilio Yap, held minor shares, although he had managed especially during the Corazon Aquino years to emerge as the biggest stockholder after Menzi's death, despite cases filed by the Presidential Commission on Good Government claiming these were Marcos' shares, which therefore has to be surrendered to the government.

With this kind of network one could visualize the speed by which the Marcoses had sent down the order: "Not a single article or column on Binag."

Press freedom? We lost it in several stages over the years. We have a press the elite uses not to strengthen democracy but for its own agenda, just another of its profit-generating companies, which has the advantage of being a political tool. The Binag thing only exposed it.

Thank God though, He sent social media to emerge as our guardian of democracy. And from many indications, it is beating mainstream media as the source for news and understanding of events.

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

Read The Rest at :