A ‘golden’ history of media in the Philippines
Since the late 1980s, television in the Philippines has assumed and maintained a
dominance in national popular culture, driven largely by entertainment media.
Locally produced evening soap operas, midday comedic gameshows and gossipy
chat shows interviewing celebrities feature strongly in programming line-ups
alongside imported content, sports and current affairs. This televisual success sits
on top of more than a century of popular cultural industries, as the Philippines
experienced some of Asia’s earliest growth in networks of commercial
entertainment and showbusiness. Circuits of local and regional vaudeville and
theatre shows, a mainstay of towns and cities through the 19th century, were
increasingly complemented by the early 20th century with the rise of radio
throughout many parts of the archipelago (Enriquez, 2009; Lacónico-Buenaventura,
1994). The growth of cinema, introduced to the Philippines as early as 1897 and
with the first local production taking place in 1919, was built over the first half of
the 20th century into a major motion picture industry (Deocampo, 2017). Despite a
halt to production under Japanese occupation during the Second World War, film
studios such as Sampaguita Pictures and LVN managed stables of contracted
actors, creating a Golden Age of Philippine Cinema in the 1950s and a celebration
of film stars including the glamourous Paraluman, leading man Fernando Poe and
the ‘King of Comedy’ Dolphy, whose success saw him on Filipino screens right
through his life until just before his death in 2012. Filipino entertainment industries,
among the most established in the world, have therefore long been characterised
by successful and profitable markets for nationally produced popular culture,
alongside the regular importation of influential US American entertainment media.
This history was accompanied by an equally early and vociferous growth in print
journalism, with the first formal newspaper commencing in 1811, and a flourishing
of newspapers contributing significantly to anti-colonial movements of the late 19th
century. By the mid-20th century, journalism too had a so-called Golden era in the
1950s and 1960s, at which time the Philippines was said to have the ‘freest press in
the East, and also the most licentious’ (Fernandez, 1989: 341). These roughly
concurrent histories of entertainment media and news journalism, culminating in a
postwar period of diverse and profitable creative and political expression, are
indicative of how media history is commonly understood among Filipinos in both
industries. Early development of key technologies under colonial and neo-colonial
powers was briefly halted by Japanese occupation, but then relaunched into several
glorious decades of success in the 1950s and 1960s.
In part, it may be that the ‘golden’ quality attributed to the postwar era is due to a
contrast against what came in the following decades of the 1970s and early 1980s,
with the consolidation of power by President Ferdinand Marcos and the 1972
declaration of martial law. Much of the Philippines’ mass media landscape –
particularly print media and television, in which news coverage was a key presence
– underwent a reset through the martial law years of President Ferdinand Marcos
and was once again transformed after his overthrow in 1986. A number of key
media organisations were sequestered and nationalised when martial law was
declared in 1972, to be later returned after the EDSA revolution to the elite family-
dominated companies that had formerly held their licences. For example, in 1986,
the television network ABC (now TV5) was reinstated to Chino Roces, who had
originally been granted the broadcasting licence in 1960. Even more famously, ABS-
CBN, which claims to be Southeast Asia’s oldest broadcaster, was developed and
run by the powerful Lopez family, for whom media was only one of many business
interests, and with whom President Marcos fell out. The Lopez clan were among the
highest profile elite families whose business empires suffered negative effects
under the Marcos Presidency, with their television and radio businesses among the
first and simplest expropriations they experienced in 1972 (Hutchcroft, 1991: 443).
The network was sequestered in the first week that martial law was declared, and
the Chairman Eugenio ‘Geny’ Lopez imprisoned for several years before escaping to
exile in the United States. When President Corazon Aquino assumed the Presidency
in 1986 after the ousting of Marcos, the ABS-CBN licence and partial remainders of
its studio was returned to Lopez, to be rebuilt almost from the ground up (Rodrigo,
2006).
The 1986 return to broadcasting formed a key moment of the ABS-CBN legacy, well
documented in histories of the network and firmly entrenched in the vernacular
histories of many middle-class Manila residents with connections to the media
industry (Rodrigo, 2006). Entertainment was always a hallmark element of ABS-CBN
programming – indeed, one of the major challenges faced by the network
executives in the first year of their return to broadcast was to fund and produce
programming that could lure entertainment audiences back from competing
channels, where many of the most successful talent and producers were ABS-CBN
alumni (Rodrigo, 2006: 292–297). But the more obviously political element of ABS-
CBN’s self-presentation was in the realm of current affairs. Freedom of the press
was enshrined in the 1987 Philippine Constitution, an ideal that was championed by
ABS-CBN, among many other voices, as an essential part of the newly democratic
landscape (Fernandez, 1989: 343). As ABS-CBN was able to restore its presence as a
high-rating and wide-reaching media network throughout the 1908s and 1990s,
then, the network’s self-created image as ‘in the service of the Filipino’ expressed
both a nationalist and an explicitly liberal-democratic ideal of the role of
commercial media. At the same time, for observers who note the oligarchic
dimensions of the Philippines, the history of media industries and their relationship
to politics is regularly mentioned as emblematic. For powerful families like the
Lopezes, a media network is an expedient wing of a larger multifaceted empire of
interests, which also include the ownership of land, controlling shares in major
infrastructure, and tight relations to political office. From that perspective, the
return under the 1986 Aquino administration of successful commercial media
empires such as ABS-CBN can also be seen as an expression of the perceived
shortcomings of the EDSA revolution, as having been rather more restorationist
than radical in consequence (Hutchcroft, 1991).
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Digital media and entertainment publics
Despite the much-hyped disruptive capacities of digital technologies, it seems that in the
Philippines, the televisual dominance of entertainment culture expanded, rather than diminished,
with the advent of the digital era. The rise of mobile communication and social media in the
Philippines has not (yet) led to a significant decline in television viewing among core free to air
audiences, nor to a measurable fragmentation of entertainment consumers. On the contrary,
popular examples of social media phenomena in the Philippines indicate that television
producers have been very successful in reintegrating successful content from new media
platforms into traditionally broadcast programmes.
To understand this success, it is relevant to note the rapid take-up of mobile phone use among the
same sectors of the Filipino population that form television’s core audiences. As a substantial
body of research has demonstrated, the Philippines was an early successful market for the take-
up of mobile phones, which transformed everyday practices and were accessible even to lower
income Filipinos from the early 2000s onwards (Madianou and Miller, 2011; Pertierra et al.,
2002). Despite the omnipresence of mobile telephony, smartphones specifically were not quite so
rapidly embraced, due to their higher purchase price and heavier data requirements.
Nevertheless, by 2018, Pew Research Center reports that 55% of Filipinos reported owned a
smartphone.1 It is fair to say that digital media and communications technologies have become a
taken for granted presence in the lives of most urban and many regional communities. Middle
class Filipinos regularly budget for smartphones, streaming content subscriptions, home wifi
connections and laptops. For lower income Filipinos, the digital media ecology may look
different but is by no means digitally disconnected. As Cheryll Soriano and a team of colleagues
explored in Metro Manila (2018), low-income neighbourhoods commonly feature an array of
spaces that make Internet connectivity accessible, including cyber cafés and ‘Pisonet’; computers
housed in repurposed arcade game or jukebox shells and placed in semi-public spaces where a
few minutes of Internet access can be bought with a one peso coin. Low income consumers
regularly make use of free wifi connections in shopping malls, shared data connections among
neighbours and regular promotions that offer small packages of data at affordable rates. Cecilia
Uy-Tioco (2019) characterises such forms of digital inclusion as ‘good enough access’; there are
numerous possibilities for digital access for low-income Filipinos, but these are shaped by, and
also reinforce, the substantial economic inequalities that continue to mark the Philippines.
As a lower-middle-income country, with notoriously slow Internet speeds and barriers to
improving telecommunications infrastructure, the Philippines could be described as being poor in
digital access, but rich in digital users. One significant digital innovation that indicates the large
appetite for digital engagement among Filipino mobile users was the rollout of Facebook Zero
for customers of the nation’s two major mobile telecommunications networks. Facebook Zero
provides a pared down version of Facebook with no data charges, specifically designed for
developing economies. Filipino users of Smart Communications and Globe Telecom carriers can
access a package known as ‘Free Basics’ which offers them a selected range of news,
information, messaging and social media apps (Uy-Tioco, 2019). As a result, as media scholar
Clarissa David has observed, the Philippines is a country that has more Facebook users than
Internet users. While only 58% of Filipinos were Internet users in 2017, more than 90% of those
users accessed Facebook, illustrating why the Philippines is sometimes described as the ‘social
media capital of the world’ (David et al., 2019: 2–4).
It could be said that in the Philippines, social media interest drives Internet connectivity, rather
than the other way around.2 And among the many purposes of social media – from making new
relationships to sustaining old networks or support, from keeping families connected across vast
distances to generating incomes through small businesses – engaging with entertainment media
and celebrity culture is a regular feature of social media use. Entertainment media has been
deeply integrated into the networked publics enabled by Facebook and wider mobile phone use,
with television content and television celebrities dominating the media feeds of Filipino users.
Entertainment publics continue to feature traditional televisual content and personalities, but now
include digital social media as a key dimension. In 2020, market research reports that of the 10
most popular verified Facebook pages in the Philippines, the top 9 are television networks,
programmes or celebrities. Topping the list is ABS-CBN (over 21 million followers, roughly
equivalent to one fifth of the national population), followed by rival television network GMA-7
(20 million followers). Separate news pages for each of the two networks also feature in the top
10, along with pages for television/film stars Marian Rivera, Vice Ganda, Angel Locsin and
Anne Curtis. The Facebook page for noontime show Eat Bulaga sits at number five on the list,
with approximately 15 million followers.3
As I have discussed elsewhere, Eat Bulaga offers a prime example of how television has
successfully managed its transition to a digital and social media environment (Pertierra, 2016a).
In many ways, Eat Bulaga is a classic example of ‘traditional’ television, as a nationwide hit
television programme that has been on the air since 1979, combining comedy and light
entertainment with competitions and games featuring members of their enthusiastic audiences.
But as a live broadcast that airs for around 3 hours, 6 days a week, the programme as a matter of
course regularly updates and renovates components, rotates or introduces new talent to the
ensemble of hosts, and extends or expands popular segments in response to audiences’
engagement. Such a flexible and improvisational dynamic may be one reason that Eat Bulaga
also builds a social media following so well, creating a mutually beneficial relationship between
traditional and new sources of media attention. Eat Bulaga’s daily television broadcast is covered
extensively on their Facebook page, with behind the scenes coverage, photography and
competition promotions alongside their livestreams and video excerpts uploaded daily. But the
transition of content across platforms is not only from television to social media; it is rather a
two-way relationship, with fan engagement on social media periodically driving production
choices for the television broadcast. One of the clearest and earliest examples of this was in
2015, with the recruitment of comic actress Maine Mendoza, who created viral videos on the
platform Dubsmash. Her appearances on Eat Bulaga from 2015 onwards led to her consolidation
as a major media celebrity, and in particular her ‘love match’ with fellow Eat Bulaga host Alden
Richards was spun into a months-long televised courtship that had television audiences
transfixed, and eventually led to a live concert event that prompted a world record of 41 million
tweets (Pertierra, 2016a, 2016b). The bringing together of participatory media platforms, viral
celebrity and the old-fashioned power of television seemed to be a win–win situation for digital
platforms and broadcast media, with each working to further enhance each other’s success.
The degree to which personalities and programmes from the television world dominate the social
media feeds of many Filipinos provides us with evidence that the rise of social media and
fragmentation of platforms has not yet posed a great threat to the capacity of mass media to
create and shape national audiences in the Philippines. At least to date, commercial television in
the Philippines has successfully worked in concert with the rise of smartphone-enabled social
media to engage new generations of viewers and expand their reach with established audiences.
Rather than sitting in competition, both broadcast television networks and social media platforms
play largely complementary roles in generating the content and user engagement that sustains
entertainment publics.
Publics, audiences or users?
There are many ways to understand how people come together to access media. Consumers of
televisual entertainment have variously been conceived of as audiences, communities and
markets, while digital technologies have added the significant figure of the user. Following many
other scholars of media and culture, I understand Filipinos engaged with television and its broad
ensemble of practices, devices, networks and texts as participating in a form of public. Among
the most influential explorations of publics is that of Michael Warner’s Publics and
Counterpublics. For Warner, a public is self-organised around a text; it ‘exists by virtue of being
addressed’ and is mediated by cultural forms (Warner, 2002: 50). A public is a form of relation
among strangers, but it does not require direct interaction among them, nor in the digital age does
it require co-presence. Individuals can drift in or out of publics, but their membership in a public
requires ‘mere attention’ – some degree of banal engagement though not necessarily enthusiasm
(Warner, 2002: 60). As a result, publics require constant renewed attention, or they cease to
exist. In a slightly different vein, Sonia Livingstone has noted that audiences and publics have
sometimes been understood in opposition: ‘in both popular and elite discourses, audiences are
denigrated as trivial, passive, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically
engaged and politically significant’ (Livingstone, 2005: 18). One implication of such an
opposition as criticised by Livingstone would be that scholars understand audiences as merely
entertained, while the activities of a public might be seen as more seriously political; yet the
example of the Philippines alerts us to the ways in which publics can also be entertainment
publics, and further, that entertainment publics can have deeply political consequences.
The understanding of television entertainment as largely private and domestic in context, as
critiqued by Livingstone, has in any case required significant working in the digital era, and
digital media technologies have prompted further iterations of academic literature on publics.
While publics were already marked by a degree of mobility prior to digital technologies (Sheller,
2004), the rise of smartphones and social media have clearly made publics even more mobile
both in terms of the speed with which public communication can move, and in terms of its reach
into communities and spaces of different scales and economies. Digitally networked publics have
been extensively discussed as having shifted the boundaries of public and private, facilitating
new forms of cultural expression and identity formation (boyd, 2011; Papacharissi, 2011).
Whether studying reality TV shows in India (Punathambekar, 2010) or entertainment websites in
Rwanda (Mariko Grant, 2019), among other examples, scholars have explored how
entertainment media, as a highly popular space for digital engagement, is creating new and
vibrant publics, some of which had not been reachable by earlier mass media systems.
In the entertainment publics that are formed by Philippine media (based on television, but
accompanied by social media, advertising, branding and other forms of mediated
communication), viewers of an entertainment programme engage with circulations of celebrity-
led media content in which both comedy and melodrama suffering are predominant. Viewers’
practices are located within the cultural context of their everyday lives, in which their social
status and class relations are an important factor that shapes identity and community. An
important contribution to understanding television audiences as socially and politically located is
the work of Jonathan C Ong (2015), whose study of Metro Manila audiences explores the
centrality of poverty and suffering not only as themes in television programming but also as the
discourses that shape how television viewers understand themselves. Ong’s work draws in part
from political and anthropological models of patron–client relations, of which there is a long
literature in Philippines studies; poorer Filipinos rely on their relationships with elites to generate
income or seek favours, while those elites foster networks of indebted dependents upon whom
they can rely for political and personal loyalty. Patron–client dynamics can also be seen in the
relationships and interactions fostered between television audiences and television celebrities
(Pertierra, 2018).
To return to the example of Facebook’s most followed pages in the Philippines so strongly
concentrating around mass media celebrities, we can see how television viewers and social
media, engaging with media within their everyday contexts, engage in seamlessly overlapping
categories of fandom, periodically converging around specific texts or offline events in addition
to their regular online engagement. Rather than separating out the various activities of viewing
television, following social media accounts, buying celebrity-endorsed products and attending
live concerts, it is more accurate to see such a range of practices across different platforms and
places as interconnected acts of participation in an entertainment public. The collective presence
of the entertainment public’s membership produces various forms of capital, most immediately
financial. But in notable cases, this capital also generates political capital; thinking about viewers
of entertainment media as publics is productive precisely because it calls attention to the strong
overlap between engaging with entertainment media and participating in the public sphere
through more traditionally measured forms of public behaviour, such as political debate.
Entertainment audiences and members of a voting public are made up of the same people, and
with a necessary and increasing convergence across both media studies and political science,
audiences have been studied as publics, and publics as audiences. Rather than forming discrete
audiences of different texts on different platforms, members of Filipino entertainment publics
move across multiple platforms to engage in both private and public networks of communication
that converge around different programmes, events or celebrities, with overlapping spheres of
activity and interest that are most often entertainment-based in interest, but which are also
political in effect.
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