I share Manolo’s enthusiasm. Inquirer.net’s Philippine election map offers political junkies (to borrow that familiar blurb on many a box of toys) “hours and hours of fun.”

Serious fun too: The interactive map offers visual proof of a defining quality of Philippine politics, at least as this journalist understands it. Filipinos like to vote. (Corollarily, an election boycott is almost un-Filipino.)

Consider only the most famous instances: Those in the opposition who took part in the 1984 parliamentary elections (”participation without illusion”) and in the 1986 “snap” presidential election had a better grip on what Filipino voters wanted, and thus a better claim to being the electorate’s true representatives.

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THIS being the information age, they say not only is the amount of information available at your fingertips virtually limitless, but that it’s freer and more intimate than ever before. That may be so, but it also requires something that’s no different from the manner in which information was accessed and used in the past. That is -it takes time. Time to produce, time to find, and time to digest. And yet, time is something we keep saying we don’t have much of, anymore.

YugaTech says blogging is like a virtual handshake. Taking off from where Abe Olandres begins, perhaps blogging and so forth have the potential to evolutionize politics because, as populations get bigger, it’s the only way to restore something fundamental to politics: it’s a process between the candidate and the voter, one-on-one, personal, and up close.

Since the stump-every-Plaza-in-the-country style of campaigning is well, going out of style (too many plazas, too many people, too little time, too much money and not enough bang per buck in terms of peso-per-candidate), the most effective virtual handshake before the blog and the internet was the TV ad. And yes, as visiting the helpful links provided by Julius Enerio and wanderlust shows, you can learn something about the candidates through their ads.
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Inquirer Compact’s front page today (March 29).

compact-032907.pdf

I was already out of the newsroom when the question occurred to me. Why did Jun Ducat, millionaire businessman and master attention-seeker, schedule the release of his hostages at seven in the evening? Inquirer Compact had already gone to bed, but I still called up Abel, our executive editor, to inflict my take on him. (He was kind enough to hear me out.) The release was set for 7pm because that’s when the country’s two major newscasts air. (ABS-CBN starts earlier, but by seven in the evening GMA’s is on the air too.)

Ducat wanted maximum coverage, and he got it, live, on national TV. Or perhaps we should say, Ducat and company?

ABS-CBN reports that the police is now looking at the political gimmick angle, in part because the grenades turned out to be duds. (The, ah, prescient Chavit Singson raised the possibility, when he was interviewed over GMA last night, saying for all he knew the grenades could have been real but empty.) Truly, given Ducat’s first hostage-taking a decade ago, past is prologue.

ABS-CBN also reports that, as reader Jim and I have just discussed over in the previous post’s comment thread, both Singson and Bong Revilla did not in fact follow protocol, and defied express police instructions not to enter the bus.

(Kudos to ABS-CBN for being the first to bring this story to the next level.)

If, as President Arroyo said after the hostages were released, the incident was “prank terrorism,” shouldn’t charges be filed against those who were, let us say, accomplices in the prank?

Senator Bong Revilla broke a fistful of rules, and perhaps a law or two, when he directly intervened in today’s hostage crisis. Radio and TV anchor Ted Failon pointed out one of them: Revilla, he said, caused a “delay” in the negotiations simply by entering the picture. But that did not stop Failon from asking Revilla to keep his cellphone on, while the senator “negotiated” with the main hostage-taker, Jun Ducat. As a result, the listening and viewing public managed to hear Revilla’s amateurish intervention (”Pare, mahal kita”) and then Ducat’s obviously well-rehearsed rant.

That, in the proverbial nutshell, was the dilemma that faced journalists, especially those in radio and TV, today. To follow the ground rules, or to bend them for the benefit of an exclusive or a scoop.

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