MANIPULATING TRUTH TO MANUFACTURE LIES
 
‘Reinventing Marcos’ is a compelling book – a passionate denunciation of social media disinformation – written by Keith Dalton, a former foreign correspondent in the Philippines for 10 years. He wrote it to refute social media accounts that Marcos was the Philippine’s best-ever president who presided over a ‘golden’ age. Dalton, who was there for half of Marcos’s 21-years in power, remembers an autocrat and a ‘bloody’ age. For years, Marcos has been mythologised and propagandised into a man he never was. This false legacy of a reinvented Marcos helped his son, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos become president in 2022. Through despotism, nepotism, and corruption, Marcos built an empire of greed until he was deposed in a People Power revolution in 1986. Dalton has written a compelling first-hand account of the Marcos regime, along with a revealing, sometimes humorous chronicle of his two-year journey through Southeast Asia with a manual typewriter in his backpack. In the Philippines, Dalton became the freelance foreign correspondent he had always wanted to be and witnessed history in the making.
 
‘Reinventing Marcos’ proves the fragility of history when it can be hijacked by social media.