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Chapter 9 The War of Words Winning Hearts and Minds To sustain momentum, the MFP scheduled annual conventions beginning in 1974. For symbolic purposes, they were held in September to mark the anniversaries of the declaration of martial law and the founding of the organization. At these conventions, the members refined their lobbying and organizing techniques and mapped out new projects. For instance, the 1974 Chicago convention launched the anti-torture campaign and a project to set up an offshore radio transmitter. Yearly conventions also kept the other groups alive. At the KDP’s fifth annual conference in 1978, one hundred activists gathered at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. At the ninth annual conference of the FFP at Peekskill, New York, in 1983, fifty participants huddled for three days of workshops. They reported adding five thousand names to petitions against the U.S. bases, sponsoring forums in twenty states, campaigning against the extradition treaty, and buying a $1,500 ad in the Washington Post to protest the 1982 state visit of Marcos. The speakers at and organizers of these conferences were often the same activists who led the two organizations. Radio Free Philippines was conceived to broadcast from international waters off the Philippines. A site was considered near Sabah, on the string of islands leading from the southern island of Mindanao. There were consultations with lawyers. A detailed business plan, with cost estimates and personnel, was put together. The equipment was bought, but before it could be set up, the local Mindanao supporter of the project was removed from office. His identity and the proposed location of the transmitter could not be disclosed until the station went on the air. Stored at a rental space The War of Words · 67 in California, the equipment disappeared when the storage company went bankrupt. That ended the venture. The U.S. opposition groups ranged all over the country, looking for any local opportunity to mount a public protest. In 1981 they forced Tufts University ’s well-regarded Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to cancel a $1.5 million grant from Imelda Marcos to honor her husband.1 The grant would have established a Marcos Chair of East Asian and Pacific Studies at the Massachusetts school. Eighty faculty members signed a letter of protest. Reasons for rejecting the money included critical editorials in the Tufts student newspaper as well as negative reaction in U.S. newspapers. When Mrs. Marcos visited the school in 1977 to announce the grant, more than one thousand protesters disrupted her visit. But there was nothing like an appearance on American soil by Marcos himself to cause a major ruckus. The 94th Annual Convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) in Honolulu on April 23, 1980, presented such a rare occasion: a gathering of about two thousand influential opinion makers, representing all the major news publications in the U.S. It was Marcos’s first visit to the U.S. in fourteen years. Marcos received widespread publicity when he addressed the convention . In response, the MFP told the ANPA that as American journalists dedicated to the truth, it was only fair that they should allow another point of view. And so the ANPA arranged the next day for Manglapus and other MFP speakers to speak, even though they were not part of the formal program . Manglapus reminded the journalists that Marcos had shut down or taken over twenty-two English-language, four vernacular, two Spanishlanguage , and sixty community newspapers. Among the six thousand political detainees, he told them, were publishers and journalists like them. The exiles attempted to set up a shortwave radio transmitter for their speeches,wellawarethatthebigger,moreimportantaudiencefortheirmessages resided in their homeland, not in the United States. Filipino visitors to the U.S., exposed to U.S. media reports about the Philippines, complained in their letters home that it was difficult to get a true sense of the Philippine political picture because the local press was forbidden to publish negative news and commentary. The exiles urged Filipinos in the United States to enclose U.S. press clippings in their letters home. These were then copied and circulated there, in a practice described as “Xerox journalism.” Reflecting their bias for a free press and scorn for the controlled press in the Philippines, the major U.S. media consistently gave the exiles favorable coverage. By and large, the exiles had won the media war in the United States against the regime. “The Philippine Government has...

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