IF you want accurate information and analysis about the Philippines, probably the last place where you can find them is in the foreign press. Yet, the amount of analysis and information about the Philippines —written in English—is many times higher than for our neighbors, such as Thailand and Indonesia.
Simply doing an Internet search of “news” about those two countries, you would find genuine news—trade deals, natural disasters, and stories like “Meet Thailand’s First Transgender Woman to Run for Prime Minister.” But you will not find much commentary like “Duterte Could Turn Philippines into the Land of Easy Money and Build, Build, Build.”
Let’s be honest. Most of these articles and commentary about the Philippines appear in major Western publications like the New York Times, Forbes magazine and The Financial Times. Do the editors of these press sources really believe there is a clamor for commentary about the Philippines in Chicago, Portsmouth, England or Dusseldorf in Germany?
Maybe their targeted audience is not in their home countries. Maybe all this brilliant analysis is written for Filipinos.
The author of the “Build, Build, Build” commentary mentioned above is Panos Mourdoukoutas, who lists his qualifications as professor and chairman of the Department of Economics at LIU Post—a private university—in New York. Beginning on February 23, 2019, out of his eight pieces published by Forbes magazine, three are about the Philippines. The other five are about US retailer Best Buy, two about Tesla Inc., one about Airbnb, and another on US home and auto sales.
In addition to these, since January 1st, Mourdoukoutas has written six more pieces on the Philippines. Apparently, Forbes readers are borderline obsessive and desperate for analysis about the Philippines, unlike they are about Indonesia and Thailand. Or maybe there is another reason.
With the exception of the United States, England, and former British colonies, the Philippines has the highest percentage of English speakers in the world at 94.73 percent. If you are going to write about Thailand, you need to make sure Americans and Brits are interested since only 27.16 percent of Thais can understand the King’s English. Less than 20 percent of all Indonesians could read Mourdoukoutas’s wisdom.
Mourdoukoutas has been contributing to Forbes since June 2011. His first column about the Philippines was published on August 28, 2016, followed up by “Rodrigo Duterte Is Crushing Philippines’ Stocks” on November 6 and “Rodrigo Duterte Flip-Flops, Again” on November 13, 2016. Mourdoukoutas did not mention that he actually called the 2016 low in the local stock market (6,729), which, after his column, rallied 2,000 points to the 2018 historic high.
Everyone is entitled to his or her own viewpoint and we want to hear diverse opinions. But it is interesting that Mourdoukoutas never discovered the Philippines until after the election of President Duterte and, more specifically, the change in direction of Philippine foreign policy.
2 comments
As usual, somebody’s generous hand have a big role about all those “viewpoints” regarding the Philippines.
Yeah this so called professor of economics also proposed that Amazon replace public libraries in the US so that people don’t have to pay taxes for said libraries anymore. Chew on that for a while.