Abstract Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Martial Law regime tried to present itself as heralding the advancement of the country’s education system. To bolster this claim, it decreed the professionalization of the teaching vocation, among other ostensibly progressive education policies. However, teaching lost its prestige as an occupation during Marcos’s term. Why did this counterintuitive development happen? How did teachers respond to this situation? Anchored on historical analysis of primary documentary sources and framed by the concept of proletarianization, this article answers these questions and argues that Marcos’s policies, which led to inadequate salaries and poor working conditions in the education sector, thwarted his own promise of professionalization. A proletarianized group of professionals, these educators turned to working-class strategies and even joined hands with blue-collar laborers to fight for their rights.

Abstract This article looks into the discursive frames employed by selected pro-Duterte pages on Facebook that tackled the ABS-CBN shutdown and franchise denial issues in 2020. The legal frames were mostly derived from the findings of the lawmakers’ technical working group (TWG). The political frames, meanwhile, include ABS-CBN’s alleged biased reporting, the victory-over-oligarchs narrative pushed by the Duterte administration and other related pronouncements. The article identifies these frames as reinforcing layers to fortify the echo chamber behavior of pro-Duterte pages through an attack-amplify-attract stratagem. C. Thi Nguyen’s study resembling echo chambers anchored on “epistemic discrediting” was operationalized for this purpose. Data from the selected pro-Duterte pages were mined using the timeline feature of Crowd Tangle as the official social listening tool of Facebook. The article also explored the impact of pro-Duterte pages on ABS-CBN’s stature as a legacy media giant and on the Duterte presidency as a social media-driven administration.

Abstract Quezon City and the City of Baguio enacted anti-discrimination ordinances to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) persons. The 2014 Quezon City Gender-Fair Ordinance (QCGFO) and the 2017 Anti-Discrimination Ordinance of the City of Baguio (ADOCB) criminalized discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or expression. With similar societal contexts, these two cities legislated two different anti-discrimination ordinances. Using comparative discourse analysis, this case study compares their formulation and framing. Data were gathered and evaluated through library research, documents analysis, and key informant interviews. With contextualization and process-tracing, this article also describes discursive policy frames that were utilized in formulating these ordinances. The QCGFO protects the local LGBT+ community, while the ADOCB considers multiple social sectors. These policies may provide potential opportunities to integrate intersectionality in anti-discrimination policy-making. In all, this study offers exploratory insights on policy framing strategies for anti-discriminatory policies in two contextually similar Philippine localities.

Abstract A little over a month after the coronavirus (COVID-19) was declared as a pandemic, the World Health Organization expressed the need for open data to support policies that seek to address COVID-19, even as governments were called upon to facilitate access to data and information. Adopting the transparency framework developed by Fung, Graham and Weil (2007), this study examines ‘laginghanda.gov.ph,’ the official Philippine government website for COVID-19 data, to determine if it serves the open government data (OGD) goals as outlined and identified by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and as agreed under the Open Government Partnership. Using an exploratory research approach, a documentary analysis and content audit of the laginghanda.gov.ph showed that the website did not provide timely data even as the website contained mostly static, general information. Health statistical data could be accessed but it was neither machine readable nor timely; while, financial and economic data were lacking. In other words, the website does not contribute to government transparency and cannot be used to determine the accountability of government agencies. Thus, the author concludes that it fails as a tool for democratization.