‘TV Patrol’

ABS-CBN is airing a documentary this Sunday night about “TV Patrol,” which is now 25 years old.  When they first asked to interview me for the documentary, I was honest with them and said I wasn’t a regular viewer, but I agreed in the end because I did feel “TV Patrol” represented an important turning point in our national life, simply by using Filipino.

I did more research to look into the bigger picture of TV news reporting in the country, to better explain that bold assertion that I just made.

The first television broadcast in the Philippines was in 1953 on DZAQ-TV, Channel 3, the original ABS station. Channel 3 mainly aired US-produced shows in the beginning but quickly added locally produced entertainment shows.

Local newscasts began to appear, usually later at night, but they were all in English: “The World Tonight” (which goes way back to 1962), “The Big News,” “News at 7,” “NewsWatch,” “Newsbreak.” There was intense competition, the networks for example moving their broadcasting time around the rivals’ slots.

Rivals also competed with each other for the news anchors or presenters (in uniquely Filipino English, called announcers, from the days of radio). I grew up listening to Tina Monzon-Palma and the late Jose Mari Velez but there were many others, including Orly Mercado, Tony Seva, Henry Halasan.  (Thinking back now, it seems Tina was a rose among thorns.)

After martial law was declared in 1972, the Marcos government seized the TV stations, targeting in particular ABS-CBN because its owners, the Lopez family, were part of the political opposition. Some of the media people, including Velez, were arrested and detained.

Mass media, television stations in particular, exercised self-censorship, producing a rather surreal situation where you could have a huge protest rally, or a bloody battle between government troops and rebels and nothing would appear in the newscasts.  The “mosquito press” that appeared in the 1980s—the Inquirer included—dared to report on the opposition but was confined to the print medium, and, again, was mostly in English. It was the radical left’s underground press that produced materials in Filipino and other local languages.

After democracy was restored in 1986, the mass media exploded in a frenzy, moving into no-holds-barred reporting. The Lopez family was able to get back ABS-CBN, which included radio and television stations.  “The World Tonight” was revived with Angelo Castro Jr. and Loren Legarda. After Legarda became a senator, Tina Monzon-Palma, who was formerly with “GMA Headline News,” moved over to ABS-CBN—and continues to provide an almost comforting presence and a sense of continuity over the years.

“TV Patrol” premiered on March 2, 1987, at 6:30 p.m. to be exact.  It’s easy to imagine its first “announcer” Noli de Castro greeting listeners with his trademark drawl, “Magandang gabi, bayan,” later to become the name of his own news magazine program.  The newscast was completely in Filipino, with news and features including celebrity gossip and sports.  The late Ernie Baron did the weather and later spun off into science reporting and his own radio programs peddling all kinds of products.

“TV Patrol” had many main anchors, both men and women: Frankie Evangelista, Korina Sanchez, Ted Failon, Karen Davila, Ces Oreña-Drilon, among others. There are jokes that the most powerful political party in the Philippines is ABS-CBN because of the number of former anchors who have become high-ranking government officials.

The use of Filipino did spread, rival GMA using Taglish in their broadcasts and finally moving into an all-Filipino newscast in 1997 with Mike Enriquez on “GMA Network News.”  His “Thank you for trusting GMA” to end newscasts became “Marami pong salamat sa inyong pagtitiwala sa GMA.” If my memory is correct, though, he first used “pagtiwala” until he was corrected by Tagalog grammar guardians who pointed out it should be “pagtitiwala.”

Class and language

“TV Patrol,” and mass media in general, shapes and is shaped by society. The 35-year delay in the appearance of Filipino television newscasts reflected a class divide. Television was, for many years, a luxury good for Filipinos. Prof. Crispin Maslog, in a report on the state of pre-martial law mass media, cited a 1966 Gallup survey which found that only 4 percent of Filipino households had a television set at that time. In the 2008 National Demographic and Health Survey, the figure for TV sets in households had risen to 71 percent, even overtaking radio ownership, which was 65 percent.

The class divide was also a language divide.  English remained the language of the elite, while local languages were condescendingly referred to as the “vernacular,” used by the poor and uneducated.  So even as Filipino shows began to appear on television as early as the 1950s, the newscasts were still in English, reflecting a view that more “serious” shows like newscasts would not click with the masses. Even today, Filipino newscasts still reflect these attitudes, the broadcasts being very similar to local-language print tabloids with an emphasis on crime, cleavage and celebrities (and preferably celebrities committing crimes over cleavage, or other combinations thereof).

Notwithstanding these deficiencies, “TV Patrol” and other Filipino newscasts are contributing to national life, linking Filipinos not just across the archipelago but across national boundaries, with the major networks now tapping into overseas cable networks and the Internet to offer breaking news in living color, full pomp and glory sometimes, and at other times, Gloria and gory. Sometimes, flying home from an overseas trip, I’ve found myself sitting next to a Filipino who may have been away for several years but is more updated than I am with news in the Philippines, especially around show biz, courtesy of “TV Patrol” watched on cable.

The use of Filipino on the newscasts has allowed Filipino, as a national language, to come of age.  It is telling that the President delivers his State of the Nation Address, televised live, in Filipino, and that those who can’t follow in Filipino now have to rely on delayed English newscasts or newspapers, or look up an English translation of the speech on gov.ph, the government’s Internet site.

I will reiterate my concern that the Filipino newscasts have a stronger tendency than the English broadcasts to sensationalize, to focus on the trivial and the gossipy and to encourage a culture of negativism and muckracking.

Filipinos deserve more. Randy David showed many years ago through his talk show “Public Forum” that you can have serious TV talk shows, conducted in Filipino and reaching different classes.  I do see attempts to insert serious commentaries into the Filipino newscasts and hope this will continue.  In fact, I will argue that Filipino expands the potential for mass media being both serious and entertaining, bringing people together for common causes.

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