Palace spokesperson assures press pool that full context would completely change understanding of remarks, will share it when context becomes available

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

MALACAÑANG PALACE, MANILA — The Presidential Communications Office issued a statement Thursday clarifying that remarks made by the President at a Tuesday infrastructure inauguration ceremony, in which he appeared to suggest that journalists asking about the national debt were “enemies of economic optimism” who should “go find somewhere more negative to live,” had been “taken entirely out of context” and did not reflect the administration’s position on press freedom, adding that the full context of the remarks would be provided “as soon as it could be appropriately framed.”

The Remarks in Question

The President’s comments, delivered at the inauguration of a P2.3 billion road project that appears in satellite imagery as a 400-meter stretch of newly paved concrete ending at a field, were captured in full by seven cameras and broadcast live on three television networks. In the approximately four-minute passage now under clarification, the President described the national debt as “just a number that accountants use to make themselves feel important,” said that journalists who reported on it were “professional pessimists with foreign agendas,” and suggested that “if you don’t believe in this country, there are plenty of other countries that would probably take you.”

Presidential Spokesperson Conchita Reyes-Salamat said on Thursday that what viewers saw and heard was “a partial rendering” of a statement that “had a beginning, middle, and end, of which only the middle was widely circulated,” and that “the beginning and end, when available, would provide essential framing.”

Asked when the beginning and end of a statement that had been recorded in its entirety and was available in full on four streaming platforms would become available, Spokesperson Reyes-Salamat said the PCO was “in the process of identifying” the relevant portions and expected to have them ready for distribution “in the near term.”

A Pattern of Contextual Pending

This is the fourteenth time in the current administration that Malacañang has cited missing context in its response to controversial presidential remarks, according to a database maintained by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility. In eleven of those fourteen cases, the promised context was not subsequently provided. In two cases, context was provided that press freedom advocates said made the original remarks more rather than less concerning. In one case, the PCO ultimately described the original remarks as a joke, a characterization the original audience, which had responded with sustained applause, did not appear to have shared at the time.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer‘s editorial board noted that the administration had now invoked missing context in response to statements covering press freedom, judicial independence, debt management, foreign policy, human rights, climate adaptation, and what one palace briefing had called “the appropriate emotional register for discussing national challenges,” and suggested that if context was this consistently unavailable, the administration might consider providing it proactively before statements were made rather than retroactively after they caused concern.

Legal Perspectives

Constitutional law professor Atty. Domingo Ocampo-Fernandez of the University of Santo Tomas said the administration’s approach raised an interesting philosophical question about the relationship between speech and its context in public discourse.

“When a statement is recorded in full, broadcast live, and available in complete form to anyone with internet access,” Atty. Ocampo-Fernandez said, “the claim that it has been taken out of context requires either that the context exists outside the recording, which is unusual, or that the word context is being used to mean something other than its ordinary definition, which is a communication strategy with its own risks and rewards.”

He declined to specify what those risks and rewards were, saying that this too required context he was not currently positioned to provide, which he acknowledged was ironic and which he hoped the administration might appreciate as collegial humor if they read it, which he did not expect them to do.

The Press Freedom Dimension

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines formally protested the President’s remarks and the subsequent clarification, saying that suggesting journalists who reported on the national debt should leave the country was “not a statement that benefits from additional context” and that the PCO’s approach to the controversy demonstrated a “concerning relationship with the empirical concept of what has been said.”

Spokesperson Reyes-Salamat said the NUJP’s statement was itself out of context, and that the full context of her response to the NUJP’s statement would be provided at a future briefing. She could not confirm when that briefing would be scheduled. She noted, smiling, that she understood how this sounded. It was, she said, a challenging time for context generally. Nobody at the briefing laughed. The cameras kept rolling.

Media freedom advocates from the National Union of Journalists and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility conducted a joint review of presidential statements from the past eighteen months and found that the PCO had cited missing context on forty-one occasions, provided the promised context on six of those occasions, and on three of the six found that the provided context made the original statement more rather than less concerning, a pattern one analyst described as “context as a rhetorical holding mechanism rather than a substantive clarification tool.” The PCO said this characterization was itself lacking context, and that the full context of what they meant by that would be available at a briefing to be scheduled at a time to be determined. The cameras kept rolling. The briefing has not been scheduled. The original remarks are still available on four streaming platforms in their full, uncontextualized, very clearly audible form.

Contextualizing the uncontextualizable at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

Also awaiting context at The Onion | NewsThump | The Daily Mash

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/malacanang-clarifies-presidential-remarks-out-of-context-no-context-provided/