When I first joined the Commission on Elections as the Assistant Director for Education and Information, there was no officially designated spokesperson. By default, it was the Director for Education and Information that took on that role, but for the most part, anyone of sufficient rank was considered to be able to speak for the Commission – at least for matters falling within the scope of their responsibilities and functions within the organization.
Back then, “speaking for the Commission” had a very strict definition. At most, it meant that the Director could announce the promulgation of Resolutions and, within the four corners of the text, explain what the Resolution meant, what it was intended for, and how it was supposed to work. Beyond that, the stock answer was, “let’s ask the Chairman or the Commissioners.”
This reflects what I call the traditional concept of a spokesperson: someone who makes announcements and little else. Many spokespersons in government still operate within this framework.
For some, such as the spokesperson of the Supreme Court for instance, this is an appropriate model considering the nature of the institution he represents. For other government institutions, however, the argument can be made that both the institution and the public would be better served if the spokesperson could do more than just read an announcement.
Take the COMELEC as an example.
For getting information about formally promulgated Resolutions out, spokespersons working under the traditional model worked well enough. However, it did leave a lot of room for improvement in terms of effectively communicating the context of those official utterances. Why did the COMELEC do this and not that? How will this or that occurrence affect things? What if nothing goes according to plan? Imagine the frustration when these questions – and many more besides – had to be met with “let’s ask the Chairman.”
And these were only questions relating to formally promulgated Resolutions. While the COMELEC does conduct its business through Resolutions, in practice, these documents effectively enunciate only top-level policy; then as now, the nuts and bolts of actually carrying them out are typically left to COMELEC executives at various levels – from the Executive Director all the way down to the Election Officers.
Considering that the broader public interacted with the COMELEC almost exclusively at the level of these front-line officers, far below the level of official policy, the practice of enunciating only what the Resolutions contained and putting off detailed questions as to how those policies operated in actual practice, caused many information gaps to emerge and be left unaddressed. Unsurprisingly, this paucity of answers resulted in an environment that was characterized by public dissatisfaction with the COMELEC.
Political players who had no qualms about bolstering their own positions exploited this vulnerability by encouraging speculation and engaging in deliberate misrepresentation, effectively portraying the COMELEC as hopelessly corrupt and ineffectual. With the COMELEC hobbled by its adamant insistence on letting its Resolutions “speak for themselves,” the media often had to file their stories lacking a critical element – the COMELEC side. Inevitably, the unbalanced nature of the reportage only contributed to the perpetuation of the COMELEC’s unflattering monolithic image.
To address the information gaps, minimize the opportunities for speculation, and ensure more balanced reportage, it was necessary to break away from the traditional mold of spokespersons and redefine expectations. This was my top priority when I became the Director for Education and Information and later, when I was officially designated the COMELEC Spokesperson.
In order to do that, I looked to spokespersons outside of government and developed what I refer to as a modern, non-traditional concept of spokespersons as those who articulate their principal’s position, rather than just making announcements.
Spokespersons of private corporations and organizations are typically public relations professionals. As a result, their performance of their functions is heavily informed by public communications strategies and tradecraft.
In general, this is characterized by an over-arching adherence to facts, underpinned by an emphasis on: promoting full comprehension by the public of the whys and wherefores of any action undertaken by an organization; establishing the predictability of the organization’s actions; and striving for the clarity that eliminates “grey areas” where speculation thrives. Factuality, comprehensibility, predictability, and clarity became my guiding concepts.
In the context of speaking for the COMELEC, this meant that as a spokesperson I always stuck to the facts, and that I had to take every opportunity to make the public understand the COMELEC procedures relevant to the situation at hand; I had to map out the possible outcomes of any given situation, within the bounds of COMELEC policy and practice; and I had to be able to draw on a wide range of sources to provide precedents, historical examples, and existing COMELEC Resolutions.
Taken all together, these elements amount to a fluent and coherent explanation of the COMELEC’s actions (or of any organization’s for that matter) in any given instance. And it is to this definition of what a spokesperson is – one who articulates the position of his principal – that I’ve gravitated from the very beginning.