• Newsbreak.com.ph, Special post-election issue, July 16, 2007, Manila

ROMEO GACAD/AFP/Getty Images

Trouble in paradise: President Gloria Arroya and her husband, Mike, can’t stay free of scandal.

When midterm elections were held in the Philippines in May, the media scrutinized the process more closely than usual. In the aftermath of the previous national elections in 2004, the president herself, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, had been accused of rigging the results. This time around, her ruling party faced similar allegations of vote tampering, particularly in Maguindanao, an impoverished southern province governed by a close ally of the president. Arroyo’s party declared that its candidates had won a sweeping victory within the province of 12 open senate seats because most of the opposition candidates had, incredibly, received zero votes. At such a ludicrous claim, the opposition coalition cried foul and demanded that the election results be investigated.

The Philippine press pounced on the story. Among the media outlets reporting from Maguindanao was the Web magazine Newsbreak. Its coverage of the scandal chronicled how the provincial election supervisor mysteriously lost the official paperwork with the municipal tallies. The national elections commission appointed a special task force that eventually unearthed duplicate voting rolls. But it forbade opposition party lawyers from examining the copies, and declared the initial election results to be valid. Still, no one doubted that there...