It terrifies me, the venerable Walter Cronkite once said, that anyone should suggest that �a person, just because he anchors an evening broadcast, might be qualified to run for public office.�
�There�s no relation between those two things,� said cronkite, the US media icon who delivered the evening news to generations of viewers on the cbs television network until he retired in 1981, at the age of 65. �it shows how skewed our values have become.�
What worried cronkite was the excessive promotion and over-glorification of news anchors whose only job is to look and sound good on television. In reality, he said, they are nothing more than news presenters who read what other people write and voice other people�s views.
Yet in his heydey, anchors �though nothing more than newsreaders- could not hold their own in fast-paced world of broadcast news. Tv news then was the domain of the brillian, quick thinking, and eloquent, as exemplified by cronkite himself. Here in the Philippines, such qualities could also be found in the likes of the late jose mari velez.
These days, say seasoned local tv journalists, the networks prefer them younger and prettier, even if they are less cerebral. And the danger cronkite had warned about is not only imminent, it is already here.
Though the wizardy of television merchandising and promotion, broadcast networks �with the television gian abs-cbn at the forefront- are transforming anchorpeople into crusaders and superheroes, and even getting people to elect them into public office.
�I don�t think abs-cbn is in the business of creating political kings and queens,� says salvii casino, chief image designer of the country�s largest network and master of the art of television gimmickry. �that�s not a conscious effort. But it�s a conscious business effort to build superstars to whom we can later assign shows that will rate and sell.�
The consumer-oriented abs-cbn knows only too well that there is a market for superstars and heroes here. The network has invested heavily in promoting its news stars thru constant exposure, glitzy plugs, and publicity blitzes. Taking advantage of high-profile news events, the station has not only sold news, it has created a cult of anchors as well. Before abs-cbn, noli de castro was just another booming voice on radio and korina sanchez a junior-ranked newsreader on a government tv station.
No other network has gone so far in promoting its anchors. But then no other media organization has grasped the concept of news as commodity as much as abs-cbn has. Its execs know that to sell news, anchors must have not only star appeal but also a semblance of credibility and authority. And they must be perceived to be hard-hitting.
Today, news anchors �whose faces appear on tv screens rain or shine, good times and bad �are about the only people the public believes. To the public, they tell it like this; they are courageous crusaders who do not shrink from criticizing the highest officials of the land and from exposing any wrongdoing. To the public eye, news anchors are superheroes who brave the worst disasters and uncover the most scandalous scams in this catastrophe-hit and corruption-ridden country.
Casino thinks the world is seeing the era of superstar broadcast journalists. �so many things are happening,� he points out. �abroad there was tiananmen square, bosnia, the gulf war.� Constantly evolving the state-of-the-art technology is bringing these events �and with them the broadcast journalists- to every living room across the globe.
�here, we were lucky,� says casino, even if abs-cbn�s good fortune meant misery to the rest of the country. �there was the (December 1986) coup, the killer quake, pinatubo �thee were natural and manmade calamities that gave opportunities for our people in news and public affairs to shine.�
The network has continuously crafted attention-grabbing advertisements to drum the names and faces of abs-cbn�s news personalities into the viewer�s heads. It is thru these creative promos, says casino that �we were able to tell the public that these people are really good and you have to trust us, to believe us.�
Voters obviously did. In the may 1998 elections, 15 million of them �nearly half of the nation�s electorate- voted into the Senate loren legarda, one of abs-cbn�s most popular anchors.
�I�m not a politician, you know. I just came out of nowhere like a shooting star!� says legards in an interview, assessing her triumph as senate topnother.
A statement clouded perhaps by heady victory, but not quite accurate. While legarda may be a political neophyte, she did not exactly appear out of nowhere. Almost every night for the last 12 years, she has been seen and heard on television anchoring abs-cbn�s nightly English news program the world tonight. Viewers saw her an extra hour at least one night every week, when she hosted a public affairs program, at first the travelogue-type magazine show pep talk, which was later replaced by the inside story. Legarda, I short, had a 12-year headstart over 70 other senatorial candidates.
Name recall, almost everyone now agrees, was what made legarda win. �it�s just like brand awareness,� says entertainment columnist Edmund sicam of the Philippine daily inquirer. �voters rely a lot on brand awareness. And they (people at abs-cbn) are very good at merchandising.�
Indeed, casino likens present-day elections to the merchandising or advertising wars that were formerly the domain of business. Given the huge number of candidates ushered in by the multiparty system, only the popular survived.
�like in a supermarket, ang daming gatas, ang daming softdrinks, sabon, margarine, so kung sino ang may pinakamalaking advertising budget na palaging nakikita sa tv yung brand, image, kulay, siya ang magiging mas mabili,� casino explains. And because legarda�s was one of the most popular names on the political shelf, political parties fell over themselves trying to �own� it.
Political operators would have drafted abs-cbn mainstays noli de castro and dong puno as well, had they made themselves available as candidates, but only legarda grabbed the invitation to run for public office.
Once she did, the station began stacking the odds in her favor. Just prior to the campaign period, the network produced gratis 30-second tv ads on legarda, and the other abs-cbn talent who ran for the senate, lawyer rene cayetano. The commercials were aired for free on the network primetime hours. Other candidates had coughed up millions producing their plugs, and millions more getting them aired. At the time, abs-cbn was charging rates of as high as P95,000 per 30-second slot for political advertisement on primetime.
Legarda had an edge over cayetano, apart from the fact that she looks like a movie star and he doesn�t. �she has a video file of all political big names in the world whom she had already interviewed,� says casino who wrote the script for the plug and took charge of producing it.
�magandang tingnan yan. Pag pinagtabi mo siya sa malalaking tao, she would look big also.�
Basically, continues casino, �we showed the things that have already been shown about loren�s previous inside story plugs. So we were not saying anything new. Except that when I wrote the script, edited, put music, we gave it a new life.�
The advertisement �isolated� and projected legarda�s perceived good points: her youth, her long experience as a broadcast journalist, her being a model wife and mother, bright and incorruptible. It also showed her rubbing elbows with the world leader like nelson Mandela. The resulting image, a larger-than-life loren, was fed to a public already accustomed to uncritically accepting what news anchors say and do.
Soon after the may 11, 1998 polling, however, abs-cbn found itself parrying criticisms that it had given legarda and cayetano undue advantage over their rivals in the senate race. It also had to fend off requests from other politicians who wanted their own shows aired by the station.
Shortly thereafter, abs-cbn president gabby lopez was said to have issued an informal directive banning politicians from joining any show on the network. �I will not allow this network to be used by people with political ambitions,� an abs-cbn insider quotes lopez as saying. That meant barring cayetano and legarda�s return to channel 2.
A story that has gone around the abs-cbn newsroom says legarda left in a huff after informed being informed of the decision at a breakfast meeting. �had I known I would not be allowed to return,� legarda supposedly fumed, �I would never have run for public office!�
�maybe the lopezes didn�t want to throw political soil on the image of abs-cbn which is the most admired media company in asia,� ventures casino. �now, she�s on her own. And that means if she�s really good, it will show. It�s up to her now.�
To be fair, legarda deserved as much credit for her own success as abs-cbn does. Those who know her from her school days and her long stint at abs-cbn describe her as an ambitious and resourceful person who will do what is necessary to get what she wants. What loren demands, she gets. Just recently, despite the lopezes� earlier objection, legarda was promised a still-to-be conceptualized show on the network, possibly a monthly special that will tackle issues on the environment.
That was something cayetano, a Johnny-come-lately in the broadcast industry, could not have wangled. �rene cayetano had to go,� legarda says. �I�ve been there 12 years. Tv is my life and abs-cbn is my home.�
Legarda will feel equally at home at the senate. Although she insists she isn�t really cut out for politics, she seems to have taken well to the grueling election campaign and the political limelight. And if colleagues and former classmates are to be believed, a political career is something she must have had her sights on all along, if one were to look at what they call her love for the limelight.
Good looks, an old-rich name and connections ensured legarda�s easy entry into television when she co-hosted the variety show discorama and appeared on tv commercials during her teen. When she entered the university of the Philippines in 1977, legarda quickly became a dazzling campus presence. No one at the state university doubted that she would make a name for herself somehow, someday.
That�s also because she never kept her ambitions secret. Classmates recall that at the start of each semester, she would announce to her teachers that she was running for honors, some sort of advance notice that she was out to get high grades.
�she approached me to find out if she could do extra work to boost her grades,� remembers sicam, who was also her teacher in broadcast writing at the UP institute (now college) of mass communication. But sicam turned her down because, he says, it would have been unfair to her classmates.
Legarda managed to graduate cum laude in 1981, despite submitting a thesis �a content analysis of Vicente manansala�s paintings- better suited for the college of fine arts rather than the institute of mass communication. Years later, legarda would boast of her UP honors and did nothing to stop overeager emcees who announced during the 1998 campaign sorties that she had topped her class and graduated summa cum laude. The truth is that several other students had beaten loren to the top.
Throughout her life, legarda tried her damnedest best to get there. Her second marriage to politician and wealthy businessman Antonio leviste gave her a partner who was used to the wheeling-dealing worlds of business and politics. Leviste is very much the man behind legarda, financing her political career and deftly plotting her political maneuvers.
Legarda�s own persistence, however, should not be underestimated. At the national defense college of the Philippines (NDCP), where she obtained her masters degree in national security administration, she was determined to top the class, no matter what it took. �she came to me twice questioning why her grade is like this and like that,� says retired navy captain marciano agustin, course director at the NDCP, who swears he always stood by the grades he gave her, which were not the highest.
But her classmates complained that the NDCP was playing favorites with legarda, who was already a big tv name when she enrolled at the college in 1992. For instance, she was only 32 years old at the time, clearly three years short of the minimum age of 35 that the NDCP requires its graduate students to have. According to legarda, then defense secretary renato de villa agreed to bend the rules because �I topped the entrance exam.�
Agustin recalls that because of her hectic schedule, and the fact that she was pregnant at that time, legarda failed to meet some graduation requirements, including study trips abroad. Yet unlike other equally busy classmates who accepted their limitations, legarda pushed her teachers to allow her to make up for her deficiencies. To this day, loren tells everyone that she graduated valedictorian from the NDCP.
�I don�t know kung saan nakuha ni loren yung valedictorian niya,� wonders agaustin. The elite NDCP does not give out citations for valedictorian and salutatorian. What the college does give out, says agustin, are medals for academic excellence, which legarda and some others got. She also received an award for best thesis.
Legarda�s problem, say both former schoolmate and an ex-channel 2 colleague, is that she is too loose with labels. On top of that, they say, she is not too eager to share credit with others.
It was an open secret among the inside story staff that the show�s researchers did much of the data gathering for her NDCP thesis. Such help is not uncommon for the NDCP graduate students �among them officials from local governments, congress and bureaucracy- who also get the privilege of hiring research staff. But an inside story scriptwriter reportedly wrote the script for the audio-visual presentation that she submitted as part of her thesis, which dealt on national security and media.
Pep talk (the book), a collection of scripts from her tv show, also made it look like it was authored by legarda. The truth, say former pep talk staffers, was that she did not write any script in the book nor even the short introductions to each script. She did included writers in her acknowledgement, but did not identify them as authors.
�she loves being identified as the best this, top that,� says someone who knows her well. One of her more recent, and more hilarious, claims though actually came from her PR people, who labeled her �princess Diana reincarnate� because of the adulation (and the flowers) she got from public during the campaign period.
To her credit, legarda has received over 30 awards for her programs. That is why the phrase �multi-awarded broadcast journalist� is always tacked on to her name. But these accolades should be shared by the hardworking crews who put out these programs.
The fact is that on the world tonight, legarda was just someone who gave a face to tv news and hardly did any writing herself. Anchors like legarda are the last in the assembly line that churns out tv news. The term �anchor� is derived from the sports term that means the last runner in a relay race. In tv news, reporters, writers, and producers do most of the work.
Legarda did take active part in the production and conceptualization of pep talk and inside story in their earlier days, when she was both host and executive producer. But that didn�t last long, and she became just a host who showed up, coiffed and dressed, usually when everything was all set for an interview, or a few seconds� standupper wherever the crew was filming a story. An exception was muslim Mindanao, one of legarda�s favorite destinations, and where she would spend time more time. But most of the time, it was not for her to get down and dirty, which is not how television wants its stars anyway. In this sense, tv is not much different from the movies.
Abs-cbn and legarda herself have always promoted the inside story as �a program that can rate, sell, win awards, survive, and bring back credibility to the television industry.�
Complaints about the show, however, often questioned its very credibility and sense of responsibility. In 1992, the Philippine women�s university lambasted the inside story for showing pictures of its students in a special report on prostitution, thereby implying �intended or not- that PWU students were mixed up in the sex trade. Critics also noted that in a 1997 episode, legarda�s voice had been spliced over that of the real interviewer (a social worker) of the 11-year old victim of convicted rape, Rep. Romeo jalosjos. Another episode had women�s groups in shock as legarda proclaimed that maria Theresa Carlson led a happy married life with ilocos norte governor Rodolfo farinas �few week after Carlson escaped his beatings.
And contrary to legarda�s image as hard-hitting broadcast journalist, she had her own sacred cows. Former inside story scriptwriters say legarda would blow her top when they wrote negative things about her personal friends in government or social circle.
The bottomline is that legarda is a true-blue child of television as mythmaker and image-builder. Therein lies the medium�s danger: People see and believe only what tv allows them to, which may not be the whole truth.
For the next six years, legarda will mostly be in the thick of the all-too-real wheeling-and-dealing of Philippine politics instead of the make-believe world of television.
While she may not be in the league of revered statesman jovito salonga, who was numero uno in the 1987 senatorial race, legarda is expected to perform better that the likes of ex-variety show host Vicente �tito� sotto III, who placed first in 1992, as well as talisman-wielding actor ramon revilla, who reportedly spends his session hours doodling on sheets of paper.
No matter what she does in the future, though, legarda the senator is proof that the trend cronkite had warned against has already started. Asked once whether he would run for president, cronkite, considered at one time the most trusted man in the United States, replied that he feared the trust the public had in him would disappear if he did so.
�I would hate to see a situation in which people who have made their name as television journalists use that as a platform to run for office,� added cronkite. �what then happens is that all journalists on television would be suspect in their reporting. (People would think) they were trying not to report the news but to build a platform for future runs for office.�#
source:
From Loren to Marimar
The Philippine media in the 90s
Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
(first published in i magazine)