Why I turned down ANC's invitation

Last Thursday I received an invitation to be a guest on ANC’s Media in Focus. The topic was on why some journalists take side during election. It would be in an open discussion with the program’s host Ms. Cheche Lazaro. I had to turn down the invitation even if friends said this would be a good occasion to air my views on how media has been used to promote candidates. I might have considered the invitation if it would mean we would also talk about how its mother company, ABS-CBN has been used by the Lopezes for partisan politics.

But that was an impossible request to make.

Throughout the years, ABS-CBN has been a political tool for candidates favored by the Lopezes to protect the interests of their industrial empire. We do not even have to ask the question.

But it would not help if the discussion were focused on underpaid journalists and not about the generally sorry state of media in the Philippines. Someone once said, the only truly free media is one that is owned. I could not agree more and it is true today of the Philippines as it has been before, during and after martial law. The Filipino public is aware of the bias but they do not protest. How could you protest when the received wisdom is not to go against the powerful who have appropriated the high moral ground for themselves?

Moreover, I am not comfortable if I am used for a talk show that would justify an allegedly “free” and “responsible” press.

I was once a guest in the same show to discuss how Inquirer could have come up with a headline that former PNOC President Eduardo Manalac would be the star witness of Senator Ping Lacson’s investigation on the ZTE-NBN. Manalac was never asked if it was true. He wrote a scathing letter to the Inquirer editors and it was published.

I was by the bedside of my ailing husband but took up the invitation then through a phone patch. I had been invited because I wrote a column on press abuse. Isagani Yambot, publisher of the newspaper promised an investigation on how a patently false story could have made the banner headline of the newspaper without even bothering to check the facts or contacting the named person himself.

I remember Yambot said it was being investigated and the investigation would be made public soon. But he gave an interesting clue during the talk show. He said the source was a ‘public relations” group (whether it was a person or several persons, he did not explain) that they had trusted in previous occasions. Yes, it is of public interest that the public relations group that Inquirer uses should be identified. It will answer many questions.

To this day, almost two years after that program, no Inquirer investigation has been published. Well, you’ll say, that is not ANC, that is the Inquirer. Maybe. But throughout that talk show, I felt the odds were against me. I can imagine what a talk show would be like on the topic “why journalists take side will be.”

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For those who care to understand more of the issue, it would help to look to the background of ANC and its parent company ABS-CBN. We would have to revisit history to do that. The most audacious reason was written in Alfred W. McCoy’s An Anarchy of Families. He analyzes state and family in the Philippines that continues to this day.

So when you see the infomercial by a super cast of ABS-CBN stars plugging for Noynoy, don’t blame Kris or her brother, the presidential candidate, Noynoy Aquino. They are merely acting out a past that will not go away all too soon. Here I follow the French historian, Fernand Braudel’s longue durée approach to history.

The 2010 presidential campaign will follow the same pattern in the history of the war between the Lopezes and the Macapagals and their surrogates. Therefore it should not come as a surprise if ANC and ABS-CBN should favor Noynoy’s candidacy and be against President GMA or any candidate she anoints.

Here is that history according to McCoy. “As the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, president elect Diosdado Macapagal had a good reason to dislike the Lopez brothers. Not only had they financed his rival’s campaign but they were maneuvering for control of Congress to position Fernando for a presidential bid in 1965. Apparently realizing the economic basis of his country’s rent seeking politics, Macapagal tried to weaken Fernando’s political position by attacking Eugenio’s corporations. “

“An insinuation has been made that we used the ABS-CBN radio and TV networks to promote the political interests of the sugar bloc. The CBN network was organized as a complementary activity of the Manila Chronicle. As everybody knows, our family has been in the newspaper business since more than a generation ago when our parents started in Iloilo with Tiempo Times,” Fernando Lopez replied.

In the chapter, Elite Restoration under Aquino, McCoy had this to say “Marcos’s fall from power in 1986 heralded the restoration of the Lopez fortunes.”

“When Corazon Aquino ran as an anti-Marcos presidential candidate in December 1985, Fernando Lopez emerged from retirement to raise her arm in proclamation rallies all around Manila. Although hardly a major factor in Marcos’s fall, the strategy gave the family access to Aquino when she became president.

After seizing power in the EDSA uprising, President Aquino, in keeping with her policy of restoring the status quo ante Marcos, installed the Lopezes as acting managers of their old corporations during her first weeks of office.”

He also writes how political connections work. “At the outset, the restored network operated on the edge of extinction. With a single station, borrowed equipment and heavy bank loans, the network could have gone bankrupt. But through a mix of political manipulation and skillful management, Channel 2 became Manila’s premier television station and the most lucrative of current Lopez investments.

“Using close ties with the officials in the Aquino administration Lopez leased equipment from Roberto Benedicto’s networks now under government sequestration. Although the terms of the lease were generous, Lopez reduced the cost further by avoiding any payment during the six years of Aquino’s rule. Two years later the station captured an unprecedented 41 percent of Manila’s television audience and earned P191 million making it the most profitable station as well.”

That is why I turned down the invitation from Media in Focus.