Tulfo covers Tulfo
TV5’s Erwin Tulfo himself interviewed his own brother Ramon
By Bryant L. Macale, PJR Reports May-July 2012
THE AIRPORT brawl between columnist Ramon Tulfo and celebrity couple Raymart Santiago and Claudine Barretto last May 6 at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 3 quickly became the top story of the day for the TV news programs and Manila newspapers.
Sidebar:
The Tulfo franchise: The media as the messiah
What the public wants by Luis V. Teodoro (In Medias Res)
Censorship in disguise by Luis V. Teodoro (In Medias Res)
As usual, a relatively insignificant event was played up at the expense of other issues.
The story pushed to the sidelines such stories as the May 7 resumption of the Senate trial of the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona, and President Benigno Aquino III’s call to Corona to explain allegations he has a $10-M bank account.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer made the brawl its May 7 lead story, the only one among the Manila-based “national” broadsheets to do so.
The Philippine Star also carried the NAIA 3 story on the front page, together with photos of Tulfo, Santiago, and Barretto. But the story and photos were below the fold. (“Tulfo, Raymart figure in NAIA brawl”) The paper’s main story was Aquino’s call to Corona to explain the alleged $10-M bank account (“Bare assets to public, P-Noy urges Corona”)
Two other papers, the Manila Bulletin and The Manila Times, also published stories on the incident, but put them in the inside pages.
The remaining five Manila papers (BusinessWorld, Malaya, the Daily Tribune, BusinessMirror, and the Manila Standard Today) had no story at all on the celebrity scuffle.
“Actor, pals gang up on Tulfo at Naia 3: Columnist was taking photos of irate Claudine”, ran the Inquirer headline in its two-star edition. The story was accompanied by a videograb of a Youtube video showing a part of the incident.
The following tabloids made the same decision as the Inquirer to make the incident its lead story:
- Abante: “Tulfo-Raymart nagbugbugan (beat up each other)!”
- Abante Tonite: “Claudine-Raymart-Tulfo magdedemandahan (plan to sue)!”
- Bulgar: “Rambulan sa NAIA: Mon sinapak ni Raymart (NAIA brawl: Raymart Santiago beats up Mon Tulfo)”
Broadcast
Television gave the story more life by repeatedly airing the Youtube video of the scuffle and conducting long interviews with each side. The news programs devoted hours of airtime to the controversy, exhausting every possible angle in the story, including blow-by-blow accounts of the scuffle and the alleged threats by and injuries on the two parties. Lengthy live interviews with Tulfo and Santiago extended the program time given to this story.
[…] the last two years since the change in administration, the country witnessed, among others, an airport brawl between a tri-media columnist and a group of actors triggered by his taking photographs of a […]
[…] By Vergel O. Santos | Posted on 21-09-2012 TweetThe sensitive subject of sanctions against the media has been raised with me through questions that, not unlike in a school exam, calls for straight answers. The questions have come in fact from journalism students, provoked by an actual case—that involving the brothers Tulfo, practitioners all, who closed ranks against news subjects, a show-business couple, with whom one of them had gotten himself into a brawl. […]