Pia to Malacañang: Don't blame media for outrage over P1-M NY dinner

Senator Pia S. Cayetano today said Malacañang should stop blaming the media for the nationwide outrage caused by news reports here and the US over the P1-million dinner that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her entourage had at the upscale Le Cirque restaurant in New York.

She made the remark in reaction to the insistence of Palace officials that the Le Cirque meal was nothing more but a "simple" dinner that was grossly exaggerated by media reports.

"Malacañang's callous reaction to the people's lament over the ostentatious and high living standards of the President and her friends is the height of arrogance of power," said Cayetano, Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Social Justice.

"Instead of apologizing for the wrong example our high officials have set in a foreign country amid widespread hunger and poverty at home, the Palace even blames our media for reporting what the US media initially reported," she stressed.

"What will they tell us next? Go to court?" she asked.

"Don't they realize that by insisting it was a simple meal, they isolate themselves even more and make manifest their insensitivity as to what really constitutes a simple meal?"

Cayetano said that the second quarter Self-Rated Poverty Survey of the Social Weather Stations found that half (50 percent) of Filipino families, or about 9.3 million families, consider themselves poor. The same survey pegged the Self-Rated Food Poverty rate at 39 percent.

"This means that about four in every ten Filipino families go hungry or cannot afford three decent meals a day. However else they put a spin to it, the Palace cannot twist the fact that US$20,000-dinner is not a simple meal."