Covering high profile crimesFocus on the sensational

By Fernando R. Cabigao Jr.
Published in PJR Reports, November-December 2011

The media coverage of the killing of Italian priest Fausto “Pops” Tentorio, Ramgen Bautista (former actor and son of former senator Ramon Revilla Sr.) and Ricky Pempengco (father of singer Charice) once more demonstrated the shallowness and bias for the sensational of the press when covering high-profile crimes.

While the press deluged the public with trivial reports on the killing of Bautista and Pempengco, it downplayed the killing of Tentorio.

PJR Reports (PJRR) reviewed the media’s coverage of the Tentorio, Bautista, and Pempengco killings. From Oct. 17 to Nov. 11, PJRR reviewed the coverage of BusinessMirror, BusinessWorld, Malaya, the Manila Bulletin, Manila Standard Today, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Daily Tribune, The Manila Times, and The Philippine Star. PJRR also monitored the coverage by TV news programs 24 Oras, Aksyon, and TV Patrol during the same period.

Media attention on the murder of Tentorio waned when Pempengco and Bautista were killed. But the TV news programs bombarded the public with daily updates on the killings of Pempengco and Bautista.

Follow-up reports on the hunt for the suspects in the Bautista and Pempengco killings were closely monitored by these TV programs and major newspapers, especially the Inquirer, where stories on the Bautista and Pempengco killings always made it to the front page. But follow-up reports on the hunt for the killer of Tentorio seldom made it to the media.

The updates on Pempengco’s slay stopped when the suspect surrendered and was detained by authorities. Updates on Bautista’s slay continued even after an entire month had passed, but in Tentorio’s case, the media stopped reporting on what was happening in the investigation only a few days after his funeral.

The media closely followed even the condition of Bautista’s girlfriend, Janelle Manahan, and the quarrel between Genelyn Magsaysay and Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., who are also celebrities.

Death watch

Reports on the death of Bautista and Pempengco dominated the TV news programs on Nov. 1 and even aired footage of Pempengco’s body. The same programs aired reports like “Ina ni Charice, hindi maiwasang maging emosyonal (Charice’s mother became emotional)” and “Pamilya Revilla, doble ang lungkot at pighati na nararamdam (Revilla Family feels twice the sadness and sorrow),” as well as others on the rift between Charice’s mother and her father’s family.

During a TV interview, Pempengco’s sister also accused Charice and her mother of forsaking her father and being happy with his death. The media feasted on Charice’s Twitter outburst in which she denied her relative’s claim. A screen grab of Charice’s tweets came out in the media. Videos of her singing in honor of her father and her teary-eyed interviews even made its way to the newspapers.

Meanwhile, the media reported that Bautista’s siblings were suspects in the killing. His brother, Ramon Joseph, was nabbed by the police during Bautista’s wake. His sister Maria Ramona Bautista’s leaving the country and such other details as his father had been rushed to the hospital similarly made it to the front pages. The interment of Bautista was covered live, during which reporters interviewed Magsaysay, who insisted that her children were innocent.

The advantages of media attention

Media attention seemed to have compelled the authorities to speed up the investigation and solution of the Bautista and Pempengco murders, but the same cannot be said about the case of Tentorio. When the media stopped their coverage of the case of the slain priest, the investigation practically ground to a halt. Unlike the killing of Bautista and Pempengco, the Tentorio case has remained unsolved.

When Tentorio’s family arrived from Italy, the media took as much footage as they could of the grieving relatives of the slain priest. As if to demonstrate how much they share the same standards of coverage, 24 Oras, Aksyon, and TV Patrol aired practically the same footage.

Stories of Tentorio’s kindness and the good things he did made it to the news reports, but on the real reason behind the killing and the identity of the killers the media were uniformly silent.

Photos and videos of a crying Magsaysay and of Charice and her mother, filled both print and broadcast media during the monitor period. On Nov. 3, a day after Ramgen Bautista was laid to rest, pictures of Magsaysay crying over her son’s coffin dominated the front pages of most of the broadsheets. A video of Magsaysay grieving and insisting that her children were innocent of the killing of her eldest child was a highlight of the TV news programs monitored.

The media printed photos and aired video footage of a crying Charice after the suspect in the killing of her father was identified. Videos of Charice weeping on her father’s coffin were aired by the TV programs on Nov. 5 while photos showing her weeping were published on the front pages of several newspapers. The media also made it a point to report how many people were at the wakes and the interments of Bautista and Pempengco.

Print was not far behind. On Nov. 9, the Inquirer published in its opinion section an article titled “A ‘biblical’ tragedy”, in which the author compared Bautista’s alleged killing by his own siblings as similar to Cain’s murder of his brother Abel.

In its editorial on Nov. 9, the Inquirer hinted that the reporting on the killing of Bautista had been sensationalized. The newspaper wrote that “what began as a crime story—the murder of a scion of a family highly placed in show biz and politics and the severe wounding of his girlfriend—has splintered into a soap opera of love children, injured feelings, cries of abandonment, and issues concerning money of purportedly scandalous proportions.”

But even after that editorial was published, the Inquirer kept on publishing stories on the murder of Bautista, anyway.