Fake News 101 – Redefine the terms to fit your agenda.

Here is another example of how propaganda and Fake News is started and then spread by the Liberal Party – I call it “Redefine the terms to fit your agenda”. Our beloved Senator Franklin Drilon is again the star in this instalment of our Fake News 101 series. Driloin (pun intended) recently made this claim in the Senate floor: “all the 3,850 who died in police operation are Extra Judicial Killings.” This is such a bold statement and one that supports the narrative that the Liberal Party has been promoting ever since. Duterte is a butcher using the police force as a tool for a State Policy of Extra Judicial Killing. But is this true? 

The way Drilon made this conclusion is by utilizing a very common tactic of Fake news and propaganda propagation – “Redefine the terms to fit your agenda.| In this statement Drilon is able to claim that all the 3,850 deaths are EJK by redefining the term Extra Judicial Killings. To Mr. Drilon, a death is considered extra-judicial by the mere fact that the person is dead and was not able to stand trial. The problem with this is that there is already a codified definition of Extra Judicial Killing. See the official State Definition of Extra Judicial Killing below: 

Source: https://www.doj.gov.ph

The funny part about all of this is the fact that this definition was crafted during the Aquino Liberal Party dominated administration. Any reasonable person reading the definition will come to a reasonable conclusion that suspected drugs addicts who die during police operation does not constitute Extra Judicial Killing. The definition is very specific but Drilon insists the definition of EJK should be as narrow as; did they live or die. 

This is how Drilon employs the technique of “redefine the terms to fit your agenda.” He forgets about the official definition of EJK, which his own party formulated and redefines the term to fit their narrative. When the Liberal party was in power, they narrowed the definition of EJK to make PNoy look pretty to the international community but now that they are not in power they want us to completely forget about their own definition of the term? This is the height of intellectual debauchery. 

Is there a possibility that some of the 3,850 deaths was a result of police abuse of power? Definitely and they are and should be investigated as such – abuse of police authority. Not as a state sanctioned Extra Judicial killing. This has been my biggest problem with the Liberal Party since the beginning. They have tried to manipulate the Filipino people by coming up with crazy statements like these and then accessing their contacts in the international media to put more pressure on the government. If we want to have a serious discussion on the issues the first step is to be truthful about the terms we use. Drilon and the Liberal party are not interested in doing this because all they are interested in is redefining the terms to fit their agenda – a classic fake news technique. 


Other posts in the Fake News 101 series below: 

Headlines that make your head spin.
Twist and Shout.