EDITORIAL - An uncleanable smudge

Public relations is not purely window-dressing or deodorizing. More importantly, and p.r. practitioners would most probably agree, it is about understanding and contextualizing. Without this, the message falls and the effort fails.

One glaring example of how a message fell and the effort failed was the spin spun around the driving by Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas of Senator Bong Revilla to a secret meeting with President Aquino at the height of the Corona impeachment trial.

A day or two after Revilla made the disclosure in a privilege speech, the image handlers of Roxas quickly put out the story about how Roxas actually loves driving, citing examples of how he personally drove around the disaster areas he visited.

In their haste to explain, the image handlers of Roxas failed to understand what it was they were supposed to explain in the first place. And so they ended up cooking this picture of Roxas as an avid driver who would grab the wheel any chance he got.

But by God it was not the actual driving (as in the physical manipulation and handling of a motor vehicle) of Roxas that was the issue. Whether he loved or hated every minute that he was driving Revilla to his meeting with the president was never at question.

The issue was the propriety of his involvement in an activity that was, at the very least, highly questionable. Aquino secretly meeting a senator-judge in an unprecedented impeachment trial may not have been a crime. But it was an offensive act. And Roxas was a party, an accessory, to its commission.

In the same way that it was never about how Aquino loves a fast car but about how he got his sports car early in his term, so it is that it is not about how Roxas loves to spend long hours behind the wheel but about how and why he lent his person to a questionable act.

His image handlers have no need to explain the love for driving of Roxas. Born to wealth and privilege, Roxas must have started driving since he was a teen. But no amount of spin can extract Roxas from a situation that he should not have been in the first place.