All about ratings: Media milk celebrity family feud

JEERS TO ABS-CBN’s TV Patrol for airing a showbiz interview that took up almost a third of its one-hour newscast on October 22, effectively sidelining the key events and issues of the day. Online media outdid themselves with reports that tried to make sense of the Barrettos’ conflicting social media posts about the latest quarrel among the sisters. Some news organizations, including Rappler, provided timelines and other reports but kept all of these in their entertainment sections. Entertainment news may have done its part to whet the public appetite for the goings-on in this very publicized family, but that is where much of it should have stayed.

Most primetime newscasts limited their coverage to their entertainment segments. But TV Patrol assigned Karen Davila to do an exclusive 18-minute interview with one of the sisters, Marjorie. 

Although sharing unequally in celebrity status, the Barretto sisters all seem to have the gift of keeping themselves in the news. It is as though there were some PR in the wings waiting to break out with yet another bit for media to report them. Clearly, the incident stole thunder from the wake of their father on October 16-17. 

No less than the president got involved in the cat-fight among the sisters and nieces, as he tried to reconcile the Barretto gals when he paid his respects to the dead.Other personalities whose relationships with one or another of the Baretto women figured in the  media coverage, including former Caloocan City Mayor Recom Echiverri and Atong Ang whose 15 seconds of notoriety goes back to his connection with Joseph Estrada. 

ABS-CBN, the home network of some Barrettos, tried to make the most of the spat with their “tell-all.” Devoting a full 18 minutes of primetime news to the cheap stuff is a news organization’s betrayal of the function of the press. The public should have been better informed if the time were given to the Supreme Court’s failure to dismiss the protest of Bongbong Marcos, the real reason for the president’s hasty departure from Tokyo, the plague of African swine fever (ASF) and the threat of disruption in Metro Manila’s water supply.