These are challenging times for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s communications team as it fights fake news and troll armies hounding the administration even more intensely now, according to Edwin Lacierda, spokesperson of the late former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.

“They have their work cut out for them,” Lacierda said of the President’s communicators in a phone interview on March 5. He said presidential spokespersons have to “fight fire with fire.” 

Now leading the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) are Secretary Jay Ruiz, a seasoned broadcast journalist, and Undersecretary Claire Castro, a lawyer and vlogger who used to be a TV personality.

Ruiz is the fourth PCO secretary after Cesar Chavez, Cheloy Garafil, and Trixie Cruz-Angeles.

Since being sworn in about two weeks ago, Ruiz and Castro have made clear a task other than to communicate to the public the President’s programs and policies: to fight the fake news hounding the almost-four-year-old administration, which became intense following the fallout between Mr. Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte.

Speaking to CoverStory.ph, Lacierda said he is glad that the President now has a spokesperson in Ruiz or Castro, adding that he has been puzzled by Mr. Marcos Jr.’s reluctance to assign one early in his administration.

“[As president] what you lose is your time with people and how often you will be heard. Spokespersons are there to be your proxies, so your message, your voice, will be heard by the people through daily briefings,” Lacierda said. “After the President, the spokesperson is the most heard and seen Cabinet official. It’s not because they are on television and radio regularly.” 

Lacierda recalled a “funny story” during the Noynoy Aquino administration where, he said, militant groups would burn three effigies in their protest rallies—those of the President, Budget Secretary Butch Abad, and himself.

“Even the progressives would burn an effigy of me because I was visible [in the public eye],” he said.

Now the CEO of a private financial technology company, Lacierda said the new-generation workforce would now come up to him to say they did not know he had served as a presidential spokesperson, but that they remember him and his deputy spokesperson, Abigail Valte, for their Twitter posts back then announcing class suspensions in schools. 

“So we were the bearer of the news,” he said.

‘Unfettered’ access

Lacierda underscored the power of social media in communicating Malacañang’s messages to the people, as it would, he said, “de-load the burden of the President in imparting his mind and voice to the media.”

He underscored as well the importance of a spokesperson having “unfettered” access to the President, or else be useless in the job.

“You can’t get your information secondhand,” he said, adding that one of the reasons Aquino made him a Cabinet-level secretary was for him to have access to his peers in the Cabinet and to be present in top-level meetings. 

As presidential spokesperson, Lacierda said, he made sure not to present his opinion in matters involving the then President and the administration. He said he would ask Aquino and Cabinet officials for their views on the issues raised in the media, and that he had never replied to media queries without guidance.

“If I gave answers to the media, these came from the President,” he said. “I was the voice of the President because I would relay his mindset to the media.”

On Castro’s statement that she and Ruiz are messengers of President Marcos Jr., which she made in response to Harry Roque’s own statement that as spokesperson, he was a salesman of then President Rodrigo Duterte, Lacierda said both of them are right to say so.

“I am also a messenger because I speak the mind of the President,” he said. “To a certain degree, spokespersons are also salesmen of the President because we sell to the people what the President’s sentiments and views are on the matter. You tell them, but not in a mercantile way…”

“Remember,” he added, “the media is not our final audit. It’s the people.”

Fighting trolls

Battling fake news and trolls was nothing new during Noynoy Aquino’s administration, according to Lacierda. He said he and his colleagues also had to contend with them even during the 2010 presidential campaign.

He cited as an example the release of fake reports that Aquino was psychologically unfit to be president, and how they rebutted these with the help of a “quick-response team.” 

“Now and during our time, technology has become a way to scale up further disinformation…” Lacierda said. “There are tools that scale up misinformation…[but they also] can scale up the propagation of truth and information.” 

Disinformation has become “harder [to fight] right now because social media has become widespread. So how do you fight disinformation? You have to build your team,” he said. 

Lacierda observed the current prevalence of fake news, with the Marcos Jr. administration, the Cabinet, and the President himself at the receiving end. The PCO “really has to scale up its defenses,” he said, adding he is sure that Ruiz is building his own team.

Last week, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin issued an executive order asking for the “unqualified courtesy resignations” of the President’s appointees in the PCO and its attached agencies as well as state-run firms to allow Ruiz a free hand in “performing his duties and functions.”

Now ‘an industry’

But trolls thrived in 2016 when fake news spread on Facebook and other platforms on social media, he said, and now “it’s an industry.”

He said the challenge for presidential spokespersons now is for them to “think (their) thoughts well” and “have a small margin of error” when speaking, especially now when there is “an evil intent of trolls to spin [issues] negatively.”

“For a spokesperson, do due diligence before you say something,” he said. “It’s hard if you always make a mistake in your statements.”

Lacierda noted the recent “misalignment” in the statements of Ruiz and Castro about an online report alleging that the new PCO chief is co-owner of Digital8 that, along with IBC-13, secured a P260-million contract with the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, sparking questions of conflict of interest. 

When asked whether Ruiz had divested his shares in Digital8, Castro replied that as far as she knew, he was in the process of doing so as the law provides that divestment of shares should be made within 60 days from the time an official assumes his position. But Ruiz denied being co-owner, and his office later said he was merely a company representative to the deal and resigned the post before his appointment to the PCO.

“Sometimes, some of the media questions are general, and you need to answer specifically, or to qualify your statements,” Lacierda said of the incident. If he had been in Castro’s shoes, he said, he would have told reporters that he had not spoken to Ruiz on the ownership of Digital8, and added, “Let me get back to you.”

‘Attack dog’ 

On Castro’s seeming adversarial way of replying to Duterte’s criticisms of the President, Lacierda said it is her call to do so. “Her mandate is to fight fake news, and she did,” he said.

Castro was branded by some quarters as the administration’s “attack dog” after she clapped back on Duterte for accusing the President of veering toward dictatorship and having no plans to step down at the end of his term in 2028.

She denied being an attack dog. In reply to Duterte’s accusation that his successor is turning out to be like his father and namesake, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., she said Duterte is known to sow intrigue. Later, she clarified that that statement was her own and not the Palace’s position. Still, she said, she would continue to rebut fake news and “intrigues that make sense” and ignore those that do not make sense at all.

According to Lacierda, “politically fighting fake news brings the fight to the other side.”

“It’s a message to those spreading fake news that we are not taking it quietly,” he said. “We are going to fight fire with fire.”