Filipinos not interested in Sara trial; only fake polls claim they want it

THERE’S a propaganda blitz claiming that the majority of Filipinos want the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte. This is fake news: the polls they cite were deliberately manipulated and flawed.

The reality is that most Filipinos are uninterested in or do not understand what “impeachment” means, with the majority still having much trust in Sara.

A Philippine Daily Inquirer column for instance claimed that the Senate decision remanding Sara Duterte’s impeachment complaint back to the House of Representatives ignored “people’s cry for accountability (credible polls say that a vast majority — from 78 to 88 percent — of our people want accountability and transparency).”

A Philippine Star piece similarly pontificated: “A large majority of Filipinos, 78 percent or nearly eight of every 10 people, want Sara to face impeachment trial to answer the charges against her and clear her name. Only 13 percent disagreed with this demand for a trial. This is OCTA Research survey of April 20-24, 2025.”

These surveys cited are blatantly wrong and manipulated, bordering on being fake news. Responsible columnists must check if a poll, crucial in the face of the burning issue of the day, is an authentic one or merely false propaganda.

The OCTA survey which claimed the 78-percent figure is total rubbish — as I wrote several columns back: The wording of the OCTA survey* is a leading one, as if the trial is for Sara’s good. OCTA didn’t disclose who commissioned the survey. (*Do you think Sara should face a Senate trial or impeachment court to clear her name?”).

It didn’t explain to respondents the context of the impeachment, that it was a plot by the Marcos-Romualdez clan as evidenced by the fact that the 215 congressmen were bribed with congressional funds that the Speaker controlled to file the complaint.

It didn’t explain to its respondents that the major consequence of a finding of guilty would be to bar Sara from even holding public office — which prevents her from being the most likely winner in the presidential contest in 2028, dashing to the ground the Marcos-Romualdez clan’s ambition to continue in power after Marcos steps down in 2028.

It didn’t explain that impeachment trials are unlike graft cases, which are decided by professional judges on the basis of long-established rules of court and evidence, and which are appealable up to the Supreme Court. In impeachment trials, senator-judges decide on an impeached officials’ guilt or innocence based on his subjective evaluation and even false information. This was the case in the late Chief Justice Renato Corona’s trial in which his bank transactions (credit and debit entries) were deliberately added to inflate the money he had in the bank.

There have been so many cases — the recent ones being that against Senators Bong Revilla and Jinggoy Estrada in connection with the pork barrel scandal — in which courts’ guilty verdicts were reversed by a higher court. In impeachment cases, the verdict of the Senate court is final and cannot be appealed even to the Supreme Court.

Red

A red flag over two surveys by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) is that both were commissioned by the now shadowy outfit pretending to be a think tank, Stratbase ARD. This was set up by then-foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario in 2012 as his anti-China propaganda apparatus when the arbitration case was filed against China.

Why would Stratbase, at the direction of its president, Dindo Manhit, commission two surveys to portray that the people want Sara’s trial to be undertaken? Who is funding Stratbase to commission SWS to do the two surveys? The US or the Speaker Martin Romualdez perhaps? Or the outfit’s vice chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan, on behalf of his boss, the Indonesian tycoon Anthoni Salim?

Of the SWS surveys commissioned by Stratbase, the second was undertaken in May, obviously rushed to pressure the Senate to continue “forthwith” with Sara’s trial.

As I have shown though in my June 4 column, it blatantly used an unscrupulous pollsters’ trick called “survey fatigue.” Genuine pollsters describe this trick as follows: “Survey fatigue, also called respondent fatigue, occurs when participants become tired, bored or disengaged while completing a long or repetitive survey. As fatigue sets in, the quality of responses tends to decline. Early in the survey, respondents are usually attentive and thoughtful, carefully considering each question. However, as the number of questions increases, their attention wanes. They may start to rush through the survey, and even agree to the pollsters’ cues.”

This poll had 31 questions — with that on Sara in the last set of questions — all of which involve complicated issues, such as whether the respondent agrees to “supporting agricultural development with subsidies,” “strengthening governance reforms,” “climate resilience,” and even — without defining what the “West Philippine Sea (WPS)” is — “national security and defense in the WPS.”

Favorable

The question on the impeachment was even formulated in a way that seemed favorable to Sara, therefore eliciting a high 68-percent agreement: “Do you agree for Sara to address the impeachment charges so she could clear her name?” This is roughly the same “leading” question that the OCTA poll asked.

The responses would have been so different in the two polls if the question had been phrased: “Do you agree for an impeachment trial held vs Sara which would risk her right to run for office, especially for the presidency in 2028?”

The earlier SWS poll in January also funded by Stratbase was worse in terms of its gross manipulation of its data. It claimed that 41 percent of respondents wanted Sara to be tried. However, the poll itself inadvertently disclosed what would be the real score on people’s sentiments over the trial.

It asked 2,160 Filipinos about their views on the impeachment. A huge 53 percent, or 1,145, said they weren’t aware of such a move to remove Sara as vice president. The SWS in its report disregarded this 53 percent of respondents as if they didn’t exist. It used as the base for its calculations only the 47 percent (1,015) who replied that they were aware of the complaint.

Out of these 1,015 responses, the SWS reported that 41 percent backed the impeachment, while 35 percent disagreed with it, 19 percent were undecided and 5 percent didn’t know enough about it to make a reply.

Wrong

This is wrong. The SWS’ total 2,160 respondents is the sample, not the 1,015. If 2,160 is used to determine the percentage who want Sara to be impeached, the result is that only 19 percent want her to be impeached while 16 percent are against it — a statistically tied response. Some 53 percent are not aware of it, undecided (9 percent) or “don’t know enough to respond (2 percent).”

That jibes with reality. Indeed, the fact that Sara’s trust rating is 50 percent (May poll) contradicts the SWS manipulated figures that “41 percent want her impeached.” Why would 41 percent want her to be tried, risking a lifetime ban from holding any government office, if 50 percent trust her?

This poll trick has been done before by the manipulators of the mob wanting Sara to be lynched, as in the case of whether Filipinos’ and the government’s stance on the “West Philippine Sea,” and whether Rodrigo Duterte should be tried by the International Criminal Court, as I have shown in columns on these topics.

It is not “fake news” of the kind our National Bureau of Investigation has been foolishly hunting down that is a threat to truth and democracy. These vanish swiftly when they are exposed as fake. It is fallacies — like the false SWS and OCTA poll results, and Sara — that unthinking or intellectually lazy columnists repeat and disseminate in their writings.

Shame on the SWS and OCTA academics: They betray their profession’s avowed goal of searching for the truth.

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Filipinos not interested in Sara trial; only fake polls claim they want it
Source: Breaking News PH