MT cartoonists have been spreading fake news
NEEDLESS to say, our concern for truth is more important than camaraderie, and I won’t mince words, since this case is so much a violation of journalistic integrity that has gone unchecked for years.
I am referring to the editorial cartoons by our two cartoonists — who sign their work as “Steve Pabs” and “Kikoman” — many of which, as I will show, disseminate outright fake news. (The former is Steven Pabalines who has a comic strip “Pango Planet,” every second Sunday, devoted to ridiculing and attacking former president Duterte and his children.)
Their cartoons are so brazenly anti-China, shamelessly depicting the Chinese as buck-toothed, bespectacled (or slant-eyed) obese men — even as monsters and pirates — and portraying a one-sided (really American) view of our disputes with the superpower. I have never seen even brazenly anti-Chinese cartoons even in US publications, including those published by the US military that are so biased to the point of being fake news, as those made by our cartoonists.
They go overboard in their fake news, portraying the US as a big brother. A recent one, titled “Aircraft Agreement,” showed Juan de la Cruz smiling ear to ear in the cockpit of an F-16 jet, with Uncle Sam also smiling, with a thumbs-up gesture.
The truth is that there is no agreement yet. The US State Department had approved the sale to the Philippines last April, piggy-backed on those for Ukraine. The US manufacturer General Dynamics hasn’t even given the Philippines a formal offer to sell the planes, and at what price. Government is clueless where it will get the $6 billion price for the 20 planes. At the earliest, the sale will push through only in 2027. Our cartoonists certainly seem to be the US’ PR men.
What got my goat recently was a cartoon two days before the elections that was brazenly malicious fake news.
The cartoon (image 1) depicted a person that looks like senatorial candidate Rodante Marcoleta handing over something marked “WPS” (for West Philippine Sea) to China, depicted as a panda. As if that wasn’t enough, the cartoon even had Juan de la Cruz with a speech bubble: “I will never vote for candidates who will deliver our sovereignty to foreigners.” Marcoleta placed sixth in the senatorial elections, getting 15.3 million votes.
The cartoon is incontrovertibly fake news. The cartoonist was claiming Marcoleta was “surrendering our sovereignty to foreigners” simply because at a House committee hearing, he asked what was the legal basis for the government’s naming of a part of the South China Sea. Indeed, I had written several columns pointing out that WPS was a bad, even hilarious propaganda move by the late president Benigno Aquino III, with all of the world not recognizing that name.
No candidate has said he “will surrender our sovereignty to foreigners.” It is ignorant personalities like Philippine Coast Guard official Jay Tarriela who has been insisting that those who don’t agree with his anti-China narrative of the South China Sea issue are pro-China.
There were other cartoons claiming there were “pro-China candidates,” as shown in image 2, in which the China Coast Guard is water-cannoning a Philippine Coast Guard vessel, with a man and two female cheerleaders on a rock marked “Pro-China candidates” cheering the Chinese. There are no such candidates, why would there be? I haven’t seen such blatant Sinophobia in cartoons anywhere in the world.
How dare these cartoonists call those critical of government’s made-in-the-US policy toward China “pro-China”? Do they really understand what they’re arguing for? I don’t think these nincompoops really know what they’re arguing for through their silly cartoons.
Another fake news of a cartoon — image 3 — which demonstrates their total ignorance of our South China Sea disputes, shows a China Coast Guard vessel hurling expletives at Filipinos on their house’s rooftop to escape floodwaters, in effect claiming that the Chinese have gone even as far as our inland waters. This is so totally fake. Not even Tarriela claims that Chinese vessels have entered our territorial waters.
What is so despicable for me as a journalist is a cartoon (image 4) depicting “media people” as part of the propaganda arm of China (depicted in the stereotype of a man with huge teeth and slit eyes), together with “spies,” “politicians” and “trolls.” Those accusations have been made only by the likes of Tarriela, and have never been proven, even with the slightest shred of evidence.
Indeed, these jerks seem to delight in condemning their media colleagues: they think only they are reporting the truth about the South China Sea issue, and their colleagues in media who don’t bash China are part of the Chinese propaganda arm. What gives them the idea that only they know the truth of the South China Sea issue? Because Uncle Sam’s agents feed them with these lies?
Another cartoon (image 5) depicts a pirate (China with the China’s flag as his eye-patch) holding a parrot with the tag “some media people” reading a paper titled “Chinese narrative on West Philippine Sea.” In another (image 6), dozens of wind-up small robots are unleashed by a “China Propaganda Machine,” with one of these on a computer writing “pro-China narratives and disinformation,” his chair labeled “infiltrated PH media outlets.”
Our cartoonists are insulting media with this preposterous claim that China has infiltrated media outlets. If they can prove this, I will resign as a columnist of this paper. If they can’t give even an iota of evidence, they should resign from this paper.
The cartoonists have been depicting a false narrative of our disputes with China in the South China Sea, which Filipinos — demonstrated by Marcoleta’s huge electoral victory — aren’t buying.
One cartoon (image 7) shows China (again depicted in that Cold War manner as slant-eyed and yellow-skinned) with his hand elongated to depict the “nine-dash line” to cover the whole of the South China Sea, which has markers with the label “mine!”. This again is fake news; the nine-dash line (wrongly depicted as a solid line in the cartoon) isn’t the basis for China’s claims in the South China Sea but its declarations of sovereignty made even before World War II of four outlying archipelagoes. The cartoonists even mark China’s Hunan province as an island China unfairly claims as “mine.”
Another cartoon (image 8) sickeningly depicts China (again) as an ugly, slant-eyed man, using an armpit deodorant to cover up what the cartoonist claims as “China’s exposed violations of international maritime claims.”
Only the likes of the Aquino III and Marcos governments, ordered by the US, as well as expert prevaricators and the clueless Tarriela, claim such “exposed violations.” Many local and foreign international law experts claim that China’s violations are mere allegations, not facts, since these depend on whether one accepts or not that country’s claims of sovereignty or not.
For instance, Tarriela claims Chinese vessels sailing to the area near Scarborough Shoal violates international law. On the other hand, the Chinese claim that the shoal was turned over to China in 2012 because of Aquino III’s colossal blunder due to the US deceit,* and after all, it had been outside the line designated as Philippine territory in the 1898 US-Spanish Paris treaty. It is therefore the Philippine Coast Guard that is intruding into Chinese territory, the Chinese claim.
How can they claim that writers like me, who have studied the South China Sea issue since 1994 when the Mischief Reef crisis broke out, wrote a well-documented book, and have written over a hundred columns on it — none of which have been challenged — are merely part of the pro-China propaganda machine? These two are an embarrassment to this paper, which prides itself on always reporting balanced, unbiased news. They don’t understand that patriotism is not synonymous with stupid jingoism, and that even cartoonists have to adhere to journalistic integrity and ethics.
*This is explained with extensive resources in my book “Debacle: The Aquino Regime’s Scarborough Fiasco,” and in my over a dozen columns in this paper.
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MT cartoonists have been spreading fake news
Source: Breaking News PH
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