Reality radio

Further to my piece on music last week, let me tell you what else I’m listening to. I’ve long been a follower of AM radio; as a writer, nothing brings me closer to what’s really on people’s minds than radio commentators and their phone-in listeners. Granted, much of what’s out there is highly opinionated if not bigoted blather, but that comes with the territory. I usually switch to something else after five minutes of this toxic dose, and that something else could be a legal or medical advice program from which I can actually learn something.

Half the legal questions I monitor seem to have to do with the division of property following, in effect, the division of families, and the most popular ailments seem to involve pains in the joints and other typical afflictions of the working stiff. What rights do I have as an illegitimate child, asks one caller; why do I get a throbbing headache every time I take the bus ride from the office, asks another. Past midnight or early in the morning, when I’m driving home from one of my poker binges, I catch the lonely and the lovelorn, calling in from as far as Saudi Arabia, asking for advice or, more often, just for sympathy as they try to explain why they’ve fallen for a Filipino nurse at the company clinic despite having a wife and six children back in Pangasinan.

I suppose you can call this “reality radio,” not so much a new genre as a modern re-branding of what radio has been doing all along and done rather well. It’s arguably done this even better than TV, in that classic, pre-teleradyo radio’s a cross or a halfway house between the printed word and the visual image: you can hear the words and imagine the speaker and his or her situation. With no pictures in the way, you latch on more to what’s being said and how, to every tremor and inflection. Radio’s a medium for which your active imagination has to work overtime, while TV, the remote control, and the La-Z-Boy provide pure passive entertainment.

I was born in the ’50s, meaning that I grew up during the infancy of the TV age in the Philippines — something akin, I suppose, to being born in the ’80s, just before the Internet and cellular telephony swept nearly everything away like a tsunami. Pre-TV, we relied on reading and listening for our education and entertainment; “watching” was something we did in school once in a while, when the teacher put a 10-minute McGraw-Hill film on a clackety spool about something exotic like outer space or the Kingdom of Tonga. When TV came to a neighbor’s house, we flocked to it in droves, leaving a mountain of slippers at the doorway. And soon I, too, would drift away from radio, trading Erlinda ng Bataan and Eddie, Junior Detective for McHale’s Navy and The Green Hornet.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), much of radio’s magic is lost to today’s young Pinoys. There’s the FM band, of course, but it’s mainly music of the same kind you can put and get on your iPod. On the other hand, the good thing about FM, aside from its relative clarity, is that your tuner doesn’t go off into the far side of the moon when you enter the underpass, and you don’t have to pull out and brandish your car antenna like a fishing rod to get a signal.

This brings me to my happy discovery of recent weeks — a station that brings the best of AM and FM together: 92.3 News FM, also known as “Radyo 5,” the radio arm of the revitalized Channel 5. For years, I’d been stuck on the far left side of the AM band, where the two major TV-radio networks reside.

There’s some ear-worthy material there, especially on DZMM — I’ve enjoyed Ariel Ureta’s mid-morning banter with co-host Winnie Cordero, especially when they take up a word for the day, culled from one of our many Philippine languages, and have listeners phone in on what it means in their own language or locality. On Sundays, Boots Anson-Roa and Willie Nepomuceno walk me down memory lane; early and late most days, the team-up of Gerry Baja and Anthony Taberna keep me informed and amused.

But it’s hard to shake off the impression that one of the two top stations specializes in a machine-gun-style delivery of the news, and the other in a hysterical, vein-popping delivery of almost anything. I know the old wisdom about TV being a cool medium and radio being hot, and maybe announcing every little bit of news thunderously like Moses had just turned up at the corner with two stone tablets does get people’s attention according to the focus groups. But it grates on the ears, and worse, it reduces all the news — big and small, from earthquakes that kill thousands to Starlet X’s newest boyfriend — to the same sensory register.

Enter the alternative. My car radio defaults to AM, if only because I know I can rely on it for up-to-the-minute news and traffic updates, but I must’ve had too much of it one day and switched to FM, where I stumbled on 92.3. I’ve been parked there since.

Why? Let me give you two words: intelligence and moderation. Paolo Bediones co-hosts a program (Sakto Kay Paolo, Sakto Rin Kay Cheri) with Cheri Mercado from 7 to 9 p.m., and they’ve been a pleasant revelation as far as these two qualities go. They’ve treated current issues with taste and sensitivity, not pretending to be know-it-alls but asking the right questions in a manner and tone of voice that put you at ease but keep you engaged. I can say the same for the hosts of the early-afternoon Relasyon, Atty. Mel Sta. Maria and Luchie Cruz-Valdez, who prove that you can have interesting programs with broad appeal without pandering to the least common denominator. Even the station’s tagline for its news updates, “Ikwento mo,” is clear and simple, and the reporters don’t feel obliged to recite an ad for the network with every extro.

Not everything is perfect on 92.3. I thought I’d left a “public service” personality behind at another station, a guy whose talent seems to consist in haranguing and cursing public officials he has adjudged guilty — but he’s here, drafted by the station bosses. I’m sure he gets things done his way better than schoolboy politeness will, and I realize what an ugly world it is out there, but I’m clinging to my old-fashioned belief that people in the broadcast industry (and, for that matter, in academia), like the very same public officials they excoriate, should be models of manners. Thankfully every radio has a tuner and an off button.

One of these days, or the next time you cruise down the expressway or get stuck in a traffic jam, give your radio a serious listen. (While I’m at this, check out our university station, DZUP as well, at 1602 on the AM band, for a refreshing kind of programming.) It isn’t as sexy as the Internet or cable TV, but for better or worse, there’s nothing more powerful as a molder of public opinion, and I’m glad that some stations know what to do with that kind of responsibility.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.