Radio and TV to be tools for national progress - ROSES AND THORNS by Alejandro R. Roces

The biggest lesson that we have learned from the impeachment trial is that television coverage can make all the difference. Whoever imagined that the impeachment trial would even be more popular than the Mexican telenovela Rosalinda?

Now we were very pleased to hear that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will keynote the National Soap Opera Summit for Social Change at the House of Representatives today. We have not been making proper use of our radio television stations. They have been used almost solely for vulgar entertainment.

In the words of Isabela Rep. Heherson T. Alvarez, "The Summit will focus on the creative use of soap drama serials on radio and television to address various pressing social issues of local and global concerns like poverty alleviation environmental education, population, health and welfare focused on women, children and other vulnerable groups. We hope to advocate the meaningful use of the popular soap opera medium by making it more meaningful to audiences with the weaving in of real life problems and situations to convey messages through character and simple story-telling. This can impact on audience behavior and attitudinal change to re-enforce ethical values to help win the war against poverty and pollution, crime and corruption, ignorance and injustice."

To achieve its goals, the National Soap Opera Summit will harness the expertise and resources of trimedia producers, directors, writers, managers of radio, film and television, teachers and members of the academe, the business sector and the UN agencies.

In Manila at present are four foreign experts who have pioneered on soap opera models in their countries: David Poindexter who is known as the Johnny Appleseed of the use of soap opera for socially-committed causes; William "Bill" Ryerson, who is the President and Founder of the Population Media Center; Miguel Sabido, a Mexican who is disseminating the telenovela approach to expound social problems; and Sergio Alarcon, the Director of the Mexican Entertainment Education Foundation.

Sad to say, our trimedia has always expounded the wrong values and propagated only two things – vulgar sex and violence. We don’t believe that it is mere coincidence that the National Soap Opera Summit for Social Change is convening in Manila for the first time, right after the decisive part that television played in informing the Filipino people about how the Senate was desecrating the impeachment trial. That is the permanent role that television should play. Inform the people about our vital problems and what they can do about it. The National Soap Opera Summit is one of the institutions that can usher in this change in radio and television. It is hightime that both become instruments for nation-building.