Note: This story was originally written on May 2, while the election campaign period was still ongoing.

Kristine Joy Patag stood beside other reporters, watching former senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos deliver his speech at his hometown in Ilocos Norte last February. Journalists were preparing for an ambush interview afterwards.

They didn't get one.

If surveys are to be believed, Marcos, 64, is set to become the country's next president by June 30. The latest poll barely a week before the May 9 elections put him at a comfortable 30-point lead against his nearest rival, and if elected, would be the first Philippine president to garner majority support since the restoration of democracy in 1986.

Filipino journalists are dreading that moment. Already, reporters like Patag who cover the Marcos beat are getting blocked from even getting near the candidate. They believe they are seeing a prelude to how his presidency would treat the media: no interviews, Q&As, briefings or debates, and limiting public interactions to massaged press statements that hardly touch on issues and policies.

For Marcos, that means keeping his opponents at bay, evading their questions and criticisms. For Filipinos, that means less chance of making their potential new government accountable.

"They're hostile. They will make it hard for you to cover," said Lian Nami Buan, a reporter who covers the Marcos campaign for Rappler, a local news site.

But the real danger of a Marcos presidency, journalists said, happens not on the campaign trail, but inside the newsroom. There, editors are often told to tone down reference to the Marcoses' corrupt past at the behest of their corporate owners, some of whom are also political clans, out to secure favor from the election frontrunner. At the extreme, entire stories are killed, while those able to get past the gatekeepers are taken down.

Marcos's influence in the newsroom goes deep. At CNN Philippines, for instance, reporters and editors had to protest a memo from management released last October that asked them to avoid using the word “dictator” when describing Marcos' father in their stories. That is despite his administration's well-documented human rights atrocities and corruption.

Journalists pushed back, and the memo was leaked to the media, prompting the walking back of the order. But every now and then, the Marcoses make their presence felt.

"We still use it (“dictator”). Sometimes it sees print, sometimes it doesn't," an employee, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak about company rules, said.

The Duterte connection

For the Philippines, Southeast Asia's oldest democracy, the fight against disinformation only intensifies during election season. The country, along with India and France which also held elections this year, is a hotbed of falsehoods and fake news meant to deceive voters by tarnishing and propping up candidates' image.

Marcos benefited the most from misinformation in the Philippines, a recent study has found, helping him rebrand his family's reputation from one despised over three decades ago to now being revered by millions of Filipinos. The entire disinformation network was not established overnight, but rather slowly built as an army of highly-paid trolls from way back in 2010, the Washington Post had learned.

Then came Rodrigo Duterte, the outgoing president. In 2016, Duterte weaponized disinformation to win the presidency with over 16 million votes. He then spent his six years in office discrediting the media, attacking free speech, and running after journalists like Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa who refuse to toe the government's line.

At the same time, Duterte helped the Marcoses rehabilitate their family name— from allowing their dictator to be buried at the Hero's Cemetery, to his symbolic absence in annual celebrations of the EDSA People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos. That celebration is a national holiday in the Philippines every February 25. Duterte's daughter, Sara, is also running in tandem with Marcos for vice president.

"Duterte appealed to the strongman fantasies of the electorate and what Marcos represents is a continuation of that, couched in nostalgia of his father's rule," said Jonathan Ong, an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has done research about disinformation.

The effect of whitewashing is palpable on the campaign trail. Buan would see people clad in red—a color long associated with the Marcoses—cheering and tearing up upon seeing the younger Marcos deliver his scripted speech. Some even sing along to the tune of "Bagong Lipunan (New Nation)," a song closely associated with human rights atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship.

Social media played a key role in amplifying disinformation. During the 2016 elections, Facebook experimented with giving users free access in the Philippines, where citizens are most exposed to social media than the rest of the world. It being unregulated, coupled with a wide reach, have enabled election campaigns to tap on social media and deliver their message to voters without gatekeeping by the press.

That, in turn, has emboldened politicians to attack journalists without fear of losing their audience, some of whom have fallen prey to disinformation spread by social media influencers on TikTok or Facebook.

At the Marcos campaign, Buan said vloggers and influencers get priority access to sorties, while reporters are hurled to the sidelines. In one campaign rally at Manila last April 23, Buan tweeted that journalists were contained to an area "with a fence" far from the stage and Marcos.

"It's easy to notice from afar the vloggers because you would see their phone cameras all directed toward the stage," Patag said. "One time, we were having difficulty tweeting because there were signal jammers in the campaign as a security measure for Sara," who is the presidential daughter.

"(And) yet we see tweets from vloggers. It turned out the campaign has Wi-Fi in the area and they were granted access," she added.

Access denied

Buan also could not recall how many times she had to fight her way through a flank of guards just to ask Marcos a single question. So she documented it—she tweeted a video to show how one of Marcos's aides extended her arm to block her from reaching Marcos amid a wild media frenzy for an interview.

On Twitter, Buan won the sympathy of her colleagues and some users. But others also wished her ill. This is another by-product of Filipinos's constant exposure to falsehoods: distrust of the media, one that has emboldened Duterte to shutdown ABS-CBN Corp., the country's largest broadcaster, in 2020 with minimal public backlash. With Marcos set to rule, it's a disarming of the single big threat to his campaign, his father's rule, and his conceivable presidency.

Patag was called "biased" against Marcos when Philstar.com ran her story fact-checking his claim that it was Marcos Sr. who established the International Rice Research Institute, once a symbol of the Philippines's success in producing rice, a main staple. He wasn't, but the comment section of their website showed people not believing the story and attacking Patag. "'Yung mismong fact checker ay mismong fake news peddler (The fact checker was also a fake news peddler)," one Facebook comment read.

Interestingly though, the jeering stops online. So far, reporters said they have not had an experience of actual heckling in person. Instead, online jeers were replaced by more subtle efforts to isolate journalists.

"It all boils down to Filipino culture," Ong said. "Filipinos's style of confrontation is not aggressive."

"The attacks against journalists are also targeted... Some of them are paid, some of them are just active political fans, but the point is, doing this online allows them to evade accountability," he added.

Anxious

Sometimes however, press coverage is curtailed even by their own colleagues on the field. In the US during the Trump presidency in 2017, some reporters were blocked from attending a White House press briefing. Those permitted to cover responded by boycotting the press conference altogether in solidarity with their colleagues.

That is not the case for the Philippines though.

In a campaign rally in Davao del Norte last March, for example, Patag recalled how she and Buan were not informed of a briefing with Sara Duterte as instructed by the organizers. "They were told that if Kristine or I joined the press con, they would cancel it," Buan said.

"(There were) no hard feelings. We also understand that they want to keep their access to the campaign. It's their job after all," she added.

Unlike the 1973 Constitution in effect during Marcos Sr.'s regime, the current charter, enacted in 1986 borne out of the desire to avoid the rise of another dictator, prohibits the government from grabbing control of media companies.

But despite this constitutional protection, the highest position in the land continues to come with so much power and influence that another Marcos on the cusp of holding it for the next six years is making journalists anxious and awake at night.

"It's really stressful covering him. But that's fine. What I really hate though is that I had to be careful of the words I use in my stories," another reporter, who declined to be named for fear of sanctions or losing his job, said.

Despite that, the work continues for Philippine media. Apart from their usual coverage, media organizations had also bonded together to lead fact-checking initiatives to counter disinformation. There is just so much work, but Patag does not mind. What really gets her though is that despite their efforts, press freedom in the Philippines appears likely to face greater threats in the future amid a looming Marcos administration.

"I lost so much in this campaign— my relationship, my brother's wedding, my sanity, sleep... and I still have to apologize because I failed as a journalist," she tweeted.

"I'm so sorry, everyone." Prinz Magtulis

This project is in partial fulfillment of requirements for master of science degree in data journalism at Columbia University.