EDITORIAL - Sugbo TV should be revived

No television station did so much to promote Cebu as a tourism and investment destination and educate its viewers about the island – its people, its towns and cities, its culture – than the now defunct Sugbo TV. It was one of the first casualties of political change at the Capitol.

There is talk, however, of a possible revival. That is encouraging news. Shorn of political color, what Sugbo TV did remains unmatched to this day by any of the other Cebu-based, cable-carried commercial stations whose programming must necessarily hew to the commercial nature of their being.

It was, of course, very easy to tag Sugbo TV as a political propaganda machine of the Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia. After all, she was the governor, and if the provincial government uses Sugbo TV to tell Cebuanos what their government was doing, it cannot be avoided that Garcia would star in the reporting.

People with more open minds, though, would accept that fact as an unavoidable circumstance and would not mind allowing Garcia to take some credit for as long as her claims to good governance are supported by facts and not made up or exaggerated beyond their capability to be credible.

And that is the beauty of television because the ability of the viewers to see for themselves what is being done prevents fabrications and empty boasts. Perhaps this is what made it so unbearable for her political rivals – the sheer, visible and verifiable reality makes her rivals own political positions untenable.

No wonder then that when the winds of political change started blowing at the Capitol, Sugbo TV should be the first ones to go. But what a sorry loss. For Sugbo TV did so much more than just promote the political stock of Garcia. It was a television for all Cebuanos.

Many people, including Cebuanos themselves, were amazed at the sheer wealth of knowledge and information they derived from Sugbo TV while it was functioning. Many Cebuanos who never got around to tour their own province were given an impromptu armchair travelogue that made them proud to be Cebuano.

To the open-minded, Sugbo TV was priceless, it's worth so much more than what Garcia had ever hoped to gain in political mileage. What Sugbo TV meant to Garcia was but a tiny fraction of its worth to Cebuanos.

So, hopefully, the new powers that be at the Capitol should consider reviving Sugbo TV. And instead of scrimping on its budget, whose amount was one of the lame alibis to close it, it should in fact be enlarged to give it the importance it so richly deserves. It is us we are promoting, and we are not worth just 50 cents.