The unique features of president Rodrigo Duterte’s public statements: An impact assessment

Abstract

This study was conducted to assess the impact of the unique features of President Rodrigo Duterte’s public statements on issues that made controversy during the 2016 Philippine Presidential Elections: Papal visit in the Philippines that caused “traffic” in 2015, West Philippine Sea Dispute, Rape Joke Issue, Contractualization or Endo, and War on Drugs, Crime and Corruption. This study used the following theories: Agenda Setting Theory, Medium Theory, and Uses and Gratifications Theory.

The assessment of the impact was done through the analysis of public statements made by President Rodrigo R. Duterte based on its accuracy, timeliness, underloading, procedure, barriers, overloading, understanding, distortion and gatekeeping using Robust Effective Communication Performance Indicators. Findings of the study showed that Twitter became an underlying structure for democracy through the audience interaction with President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s public statements, tweets of the audiences with the hashtags, and the dissemination and presentation of the information by the media.