Call of Duterte: western reporting on the Philippines' totalitarian drift

The chaotic and contradictory nature of the Duterte regime is matched by confusion, hypocrisy, and inaccuracy in its coverage by British and American mainstream journalists on all points of a narrow political spectrum (conservative at one extreme through to left-liberal on the other) that is delimited by market pressures and the ideological assumptions of both mega-rich proprietors and the journalists themselves. The result is that most so-called journals of record in the West offer partial, unreliable explanations for how Duterte’s Philippines came to be, and their vocabulary is bereft of important phenomena such as neoliberalism, US imperialism and Western ethnocentrism.