The following is feedback sent by Ariel Sebellino, Executive Director of the Philippine Press Institute (PPI), the national association of newspapers in the country, following the launch of the MoneyPolitics website by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) last April 26. The MoneyPolitics site aggregates the documents and databases collected by the PCIJ over the last 24 years on public finance records, statements of assets liabilities and net worth, election spending and donation reports, civil works contracts, and socio-economic statistics in the Philippines. The MoneyPolitics website may be accessed here.
IT WAS SO EASY looking at it. In fact navigating through it is a no-brainer. At face value, it comes across as another investigation and scrutiny of the monies of the powers-that-be — or the lingering and pervasive corruption in Philippine politics — in numbers and innumerable data.
I, for one, am amazed with how everything was put together seamlessly by the PCIJ to bring to the fore its most ambitious project to date — MoneyPolitics Online. Culling voluminous documents from way back and converting them into data sheets through scraping and scripting, details of otherwise hard-to-understand SALNs are churned out for easy reading and comprehension.
A product of tedious and committed effort to say the least, MoneyPolitics delves into the realm and dynamics of governance and spending. Take for example the pork shares of the Representatives. Data are presented to show how these were spent and what kinds of projects were funded. Without prejudice, it enables the reader to make an insightful conclusion on how worthless some expenditures were and question how their constituents benefitted from them.
For journalists and and media practitioners in general, it is a dependable reference to reinforce writing (not limited to investigative journalism) that is wanting in substantive numerical data to essentially illustrate, say the correlation between how an elected government official governs and how the people’s taxes are utilized truthfully.
During its initial presentation by the PCIJ, I asked about other data that may not have been included because it seemed to me every bit of information about local and national governance is already there. According to the people behind it, “it is a work in progress”.
At the end of the day, it is teaching me. It gives me the tool to understand how much of governance and public service have something to do with transparency and accountability — and making sense of the truth that should allow me to make informed decisions for a better quality of life.