Category: Money Politics

Nancy Binay agent writes PCIJ: Pol ads only P51M, not P82.8M

mcmangahas Leave a comment

THE ADVERTISING agent of senatorial candidate Ma. Lourdes Nancy Binay (United Nationalist Alliance) on Friday took exception to a PCIJ report that his client has aired and booked P82.8 million worth of political advertisements, based on contracts submitted by print and broadcast media agencies to the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Tom Banguis, Jr., Chairman/CEO of Mediaforce Vizeum, Binay’s advertising agent, said that Binay has so far incurred “only P51 million in political advertisements” for the first 60 days (Feb. 12 to April 10, 2013) of the 90-day official campaign period.

Mr Banguis wrote: “We suspect that your Comelec sources did not properly distinguish between aired spots and importantly, those booked for future airing. Since we have booked Ms. Binay’s ads to cover her campaign up to May 11, it is likely that your source may have provided data on her total booking for the whole election campaign.”

A more careful reading of the PCIJ story should have clarified matters to Mr. Banguis. The PCIJ stands by its story.

The story precisely stated that the P82.8-million figure represented the political ads “aired, published, and booked” for Binay and the other candidates, according to advertising contracts that media agencies have signed and sealed with the candidates, the political parties, and party-list groups.

Media agencies are required in law to submit to the Comelec copies of all advertising contracts, broadcast logs, and telecast orders after every 30 days of the campaign period.

The PCIJ story was based on the documents that the media agencies had submitted to the Comelec for the period covering Feb. 12 to April 10, 2013, the first 60 days of the 90-day official campaign period for national candidates.

The media agencies, not the Comelec, reported the fact of the purchase of political ads for Binay during the period covered in their reports.

It must be noted that the major networks enforce a “pay before broadcast” policy among its advertising clients, which entails payment of advertisements before actual airing date.

The PCIJ story looked at the political ad expenses for and by the candidates and the political parties, according to the contracts submitted to Comelec.

Because the contracts had been signed and submitted to the Comelec, the values of the ads may be clearly considered as expenses incurred for and by the candidates.

The PCIJ has yet to aggregate the total airtime that the candidates have incurred, pending the airing of all their booked ads.

The PCIJ story had precisely noted that some of the political ads had been booked for broadcast up to May 11, 2013, the last day of the campaign period.

The documents from the media agencies showed that this was the same case with Binay’s UNA party and Binay’s party-mate, Cagayan Rep. Juan ‘Jack’ Ponce Enrile Jr., also clients of Mediaforce.

Like Mediaforce, however, other advertising agencies had also booked ads for their respective clients scheduled for airing until May 11.

They include Zenith Optemdia for San Juan Rep. Joseph Victor Ejercito and the Bagong Henerasyon party-list group; Mediacom for Aurora Rep. Edgardo Angara Jr., Havas Media Ortega/Mejah for re-electionist senator Loren Legarda, Tiger 22 Media Corp. for Grace Poe-Llamanzares, Message Bureau Inc. for re-electionist senator Francis Escudero, and MultimediaScape Inc. for former senator Ma. Ana Consuelo Madrigal.

Angara, Legarda, Poe-Llamanzares, Escudero, and Madrigal are candidates of the Team PNoy coalition led by President Aquino’s Liberal Party.

In addition, the following party-list groups have also procured political ads with May 11 as “finish date” of airing, on “direct” arrangements with the media agencies — ABAKADA, ABS, Ading, AKO Bikol, and AMS.

Below is the full text of the letter that Mediaforce sent to PCIJ:

Ms. Malu Mangahas
PCIJ

Ms. Mangahas,

This is to call attention to the PCIJ article “P1.3 Billion Pol ads aired, booked” as it contains inaccurate information on the ad spending of the senatorial candidates for the period February 12-April 10. In particular, Nancy Binay’s spending for the period was erroneously reported as P82.8 Million.

Based on ad contracts submitted to the networks, Ms. Binay’s actual expenditures amounted to only P51 million for the said period. Based on Nielsen estimates, the other candidates expenditures were Villar P 63.9 Million, Cayetano P59 Million, Aquino P56 Million, Enrile P54 Million, and Poe P48 Million. Team UNA expenditures were only P45.5 Million. These figures are significantly different from those the PCIJ reported. Please refer to attached. Please do not hesitate to call us for any further clarification you may find necessary.

We suspect that your Comelec sources did not properly distinguish between aired spots and importantly, those booked for future airing. Since we have booked Ms. Binay’s ads to cover her campaign up to May 11, it is likely that your source may have provided data on her total booking for the whole election campaign.

We would appreciate your rectification of the said PCIJ report. Thank you and best regards.

Tom Banguis, Jr.
Chairman/CEO
Mediaforce Vizeum

PCIJ launches MoneyPolitics online

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

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THE PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM (PCIJ) is proud to announce the launch of its MoneyPolitics website, a new rich database meant to enable citizens with an online resource, research, and analysis tool on elections, public funds, and governance in the Philippines.

The website, MoneyPolitics.PCIJ.org, was developed with a three-year grant from the Open Society Foundation (OSF). It will go online next week.

The site aggregates the cache of documents and databases that the PCIJ has amassed in its 24-year existence on public finance records; statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN); election spending reports; civil works contracts; graft and corruption cases; profiles of elective and appointive officials; data on elections and political families; and socio-economic statistics across the Philippines.

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PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas explains the concept behind the Money Politics site

MoneyPolitics is designed to serve as a ready-to-access tool for citizens, journalists, civil society groups, policy analysts, scholars, and public agencies and regulators. The site links and loops information enrolled in public documents to allow readers to discern how money in politics drives and defines policy and governance in the country.

PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas said that the PCIJ Library has 57 gigabytes of digital information, with more than 6,400 unique files on elective and appointive officials from mayor to the Presidents, dating to as far back as 1998.

The 57 gigabytes of digital files of the PCIJ represent just a small portion of the total cache of raw source documents that the PCIJ has collected in the course of the work on investigative reports, books, video documentaries, and training seminars by its writers, editors, researchers, and fellows.

Using the OSF grant, the PCIJ in 2011 started digitizing, aggregating, and organizing datasets for MoneyPolitics using as backbone the cache of documents that it has gathered from its birth in 1989.

More public documents were acquired to bridge the gaps in data, as well as to collect information on local elective officials and appointive officials from the other branches.

Some of the files featured in MoneyPolitics come from documents that are no longer publicly available, or had been lost over the years.

Some election spending reports, for example, had been burned in the fire that gutted the old office of the Commission on Elections in Intramuros, Manila, years ago. However, the PCIJ had managed to keep copies of these files in its library.

A work in progress, MoneyPolitics will feature a steady harvest of new and more datasets in the coming years, or in time for the synchronized national and local elections in 2016.

PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan said MoneyPolitcs features four content categories.

Public Profiles offers information on elective and appointed officials  from mayors, vice mayors, and councilors on the local level, up to President and Vice President, as well as from the judiciary, the constitutional commissions, the armed services, and some government-owned and -controlled corporations.

The datasets include time-series information on the career, wealth, and election donors and expenditures of public officials.

Also featured under this tab is the Social Network of the official, or data on his/her business interests and financial connections, family ties, and election donors.

A page under the Public Profiles tab is Public Spending, which focuses on pork barrel releases and disbursement by the senators and congressmen, and internal revenue allotment for the local government officials.

Campaign Finance, the second tab, uploads the statements of election contributions and expenditures (SECE) that elective officials had submitted to the Commission on Elections since 1998. This tab will allow the public a peek into how much officials spend just to bag their positions in government.

The third tab, Public Funds, presents information on how government raises revenues and spends public funds. These include data on the yearly budgets, allocations by departments, lump-sum items in the national budget such as special purpose funds and pork barrel allocations.

The fourth tab, Elections and Governance, offers data on governance indicators, political clans, and elections and socio-economic statistics for provinces, towns, and cities of the country.

Ilagan added that the PCIJ would also like to encourage the public to be more proactive by donating or uploading documents, especially on the local level.

PCIJ Researcher Rowena Caronan said development work on MoneyPolitics involved months of haunting the halls of the Commission on Elections, Office of the President, the Office of the Ombudsman, among many other public agencies that are repositories of documents, to request and photocopy official records.

At times, Caronan said, the PCIJ staff had to spend entire weeks just photocopying documents. This, however, was only the first step. The PCIJ have had to scan, digitize, organize, and aggregate the data enrolled in the documents in Excel, spreadsheet, CSV, and other formats to allow for sorting and analysis as datasets.

Interestingly, Caronan also gave everyone an idea of just how inaccessible some public documents are to the public, not just because of a culture of secrecy in some agencies but also because of the prohibitive costs of reproducing the documents.

For example, Caronan said the Office of the President charges five pesos per photocopied page, while the Civil Service Commission charges P30 per page. In some other agencies though, she said public records are available online and at no cost at all on requesting parties.

The PCIJ also had to do scraping and scripting of the data available on government websites to develop some of the pages of MoneyPolitics.

 

P1.3-B pol ads aired, booked

mcmangahas Leave a comment

AS OF LAST April 10, P1,320,116,506.81 worth of political ads had already been aired, published, and booked for and by 21 of the 33 senatorial candidates, and 20 political parties and party-list groups.

Print and broadcast media agencies have submitted a total of 287 advertising contracts and telecast orders to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) covering ads aired, published, and/or booked thus far by the candidates and the political parties.

The documents showed that the children of the so-called “Three Kings” of the political opposition, the daughter of “Da King” of Philippine movies, and those born to old and new political clans are the top 10 spenders on political ads.

This is happening amid the seemingly changeless picture of poverty in the land: The administration and opposition political parties and most of their candidates for senator are pouring buckets of money on political ads.

The total value of these ads has already breached the P1-billion mark, but will certainly keep on rising. The ad contracts submitted to Comelec covered only the ads aired and booked for the first 60 days (Feb. 12 to April 10, 2013) of the 90-day official campaign period for national candidates.

By cluster, the ads aired and booked for the opposition United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) coalition and six of its nine senatorial candidates had reached P587,593,483.02, or nearly P100 million less than the P682,898,916.87 ads that had been procured by administration Team PNoy and its 12 candidates.

Read the reports, check out the data tables:

* Kids of ‘Kings’ and clans top spenders: P1.3-B pol ads aired, booked in 60 days
* Money politics questions split candidates for senator

Cagayan Rep. Juan ‘Jack’ Ponce Enrile Jr, only son of Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, ranked No. 1 with P151.2 million worth of ads aired and booked.

San Juan Representative Joseph Victor ‘JV’ Ejercito, son of deposed President Joseph Ejercito Estrada by re-electionist San Juan City Mayor Guia Gomez, landed in No. 2 with P137.1 million.

UNA came in at No. 3 with P120.3 million in political ads, including TV spots booked for airing until May 11, 2013, the last day of the campaign.

At fifth spot is newbie candidate Ma. Lourdes Nancy Binay, daughter of Vice President Jejomar ‘Jojo’ Binay, with P82.8 million in ads aired and booked during the period.

Of Team PNoy’s candidates, Aurora Rep. Sonny Angara is the top spender. He ranked fourth in the list with P85.52 million ads aired and booked for and in his name.

Grace Poe-Llamanzares, daughter of the late Fernando Poe Jr., the late “king” of Philippine action films, came in sixth with P74,688,473.45 ads aired and booked in her favor

The bottom spender among Team Pnoy’s candidates is re-electionist senator Antonio ‘Sonny’ Trillanes IV, with P12.41 million.

President Aquino’s Liberal Party, for its part, aired and booked another P68.43 million of political ads during the period, featuring all its 12 candidates.

Completing the Top 10 list of political ad buyers in the campaign’s first 60 days are three LP candidates — former senator Ma. Ana Consuelo ‘Jamby’ Madrigal with P66.7 million of ads aired and booked; the President’s first cousin Paolo Banigno ‘Bam’ Aquino, P56.24 million; and re-electionist senator Loren Regina B. Legarda, P46.95 million.

Former Las Pinas representative Cynthia A. Villar, wife of outgoing senator Manuel B. Villar — the biggest spender on political ads in the May 2010 presidential elections and the wealthiest of the 23 incumbent senators — landed in a surprisingly low spot, No. 16, in the list of 41 ad spenders.

Cynthia Villar’s political ads totaled P32.7 million only, based on the records submitted to the Comelec. It seemed, though, that this modest amount got a supplemental boost from another P32.99 million in ads that her husband’s Nacionalista Party purchased during the same period.

Curiously, some supposedly cash-poor candidates have outranked some supposedly cash-rich candidates.

Former Akbayan party list representative Ana Theresa ‘Risa’ Hontiveros had P31.80 million worth of ads aired and booked for and in her name during the period, compared with much smaller ad buys by four candidates who had served as senators — Juan Miguel ‘Migs’ Zubiri, P28.43 million; Aquilino Martin ‘Koko’ Pimentel III, P27.49 million; Ernesto M. Maceda, P22.19 million; and Trillanes, P12.41 million.

Even Bayan Muna representative Teodoro ‘Teddy’ A. Casino, who is literally “running” across the nation on an avowed tight budget, incurred P8.69 million worth of aired and booked ads, or more than double the P3.81-million ad spend of outgoing Palawan governor Edward S. Hagedorn, according to the documents.

And yet, when PCIJ interviewed 19 candidates for senator about their position on money and politics issues, many said they will strive to rein in their campaign spending, solicit donations, and spend only within the limits of election laws. However, other issues such as the continued disbursement of pork-barrel funds yielded a split opinion among the candidates.