Governing the Narrative: Algorithmic Power, Propaganda, and the Ethical Resistance of Filipino Journalists in the 2022 Philippine National Elections

This qualitative study investigates how Filipino journalists negotiated ethical dilemmas amid the algorithmic, polarized, and economically precarious media environment of the 2022 National and Local Elections. Drawing upon 27 in-depth semi-structured interviews with practitioners across broadcast, online, and community news organizations, the study employs thematic analysis to examine the moral dynamics shaping contemporary election coverage. Grounded in Ward’s (2019) virtue ethics, McLuhan’s (1964) media ecology, Shoemaker and Vos’s (2009) gatekeeping theory, and McQuail’s (2013) normative media theory, the research develops the Ethical Navigation Framework for Digital Election Coverage as a contextualized model of moral agency within Philippine journalism. Findings reveal that journalists operate in an accelerated and metricized environment where algorithms and audience analytics increasingly mediate editorial judgment. Within these conditions, practitioners continuously negotiate tensions between speed and verification, visibility and integrity, and survival and civic duty. Despite structural pressures, journalists demonstrate adaptive virtue ethics through micro-ethical practices—fact-checking rituals, public correction threads, peer debriefings, and algorithmic subversions—that sustain professional integrity and civic accountability. These acts of ethical navigation generate moral resilience, understood as the capacity to uphold reflexive judgment under constraint. Further, this research argues that digital journalism ethics must be reimagined not as adherence to static codes but as ecological responsiveness—a continuous negotiation between technological affordances, institutional constraints, and democratic imperatives.