The Ultra Tragedy: When Media Followed the Market

By Luige A. del Puerto

AFTER more than 70 people died in a mad rush to get inside a sports complex where a noontime TV extravaganza was to take place one morning in February, one news company found itself the subject of the news.

ABS-CBN, on whose station the game show Wowowee was being aired, became the news.  Among journalists, turning one’s camera and pen toward another media entity presented a complex and awkward situation. For how, indeed, does one cover a “kapamilya”?

If the situation was difficult enough for most journalists, it was more so for those who worked for ABS-CBN.  How can a news station cover itself?

Perceptible difference
Chay Hofileña, director of the MA Journalism program at the Ateneo de Manila University, saw a perceptible difference in the way ABS-CBN News and GMA-7 News initially handled the tragedy that took place at Ultra stadium. Switching channels that Saturday, she was comparing the coverage of the two rival networks.

She observed that it took longer for ABS-CBN to air the stampede compared to GMA-7, even though ABS-CBN had more access to the incident because it was, after all, its entertainment arm that sponsored the show.  By not immediately going on air, she thought ABS-CBN might have missed the raw emotions of people.

Hofileña also observed that not only was GMA-7 very quick in doing man-on-the-street interviews, it went after the angry sound bites.

She believed there were undercurrents involved: compe-tition between GMA-7 and ABS-CBN has always been fierce.

“If you can capture the sound bytes, then that’s good for your station,” she said. “If GMA was getting the sound bytes from the people who were there, it was as if ABS-CBN were putting a lot of emphasis on what was going to be done.”

Hofileña had the impression that the interviews conducted by ABS-CBN did not mirror the same anger that was shown by those interviewed by GMA 7.

It could be human nature at work at that time, according to her. “As a media company, it would be imprudent and careless to have somebody badmouthing you in your own station. That’s going to affect ratings and that’s going to affect credibility,” she said.

Loyalty vs duty
One ABS-CBN reporter said he was, in fact, concerned that loyalty to his company could affect his coverage. He admitted feeling personally hurt when the head of a fact-finding inquiry stated that ABS-CBN had treated the participants of its game shows “like animals,” but added that this did not stop him from putting out the criticism on air.

According to Maria Ressa, chief of ABS-CBN News and ANC, there was one specific instruction from the news bureau and that was for the reporters to dissociate themselves from ABS-CBN the company and think of themselves as, first, journalists.

“We are journalists first.  Go out and cover this story and write like you don’t work for ABS-CBN.  Get to the facts and get it first,” Ressa instructed her reporters.

She also said if there was any delay in reporting the news, it was caused by logistical prob-lems. Because it was a Saturday, reporters and cameramen who were on their day-off had to be woken and told to get to the site of the tragedy. Technical facilities also had to be moved in.

Ressa, a veteran CNN re-porter, heard about the stampede at 7:30 a.m. She was in Clark in Central Luzon for a media gathering. She immediately left for Manila.

“Was it being spun?” she said of their coverage. “I can tell you that ABS-CBN did its best to give the story, and our focus that first day was to connect the people who were lost to help them find their relatives. In that instance, it was so much easier because it was really public service,” she said.

But she found it absurd, even insulting, that some people assumed that ABS-CBN would not do the story at all.

Her company very much wanted to do the story, she said. “And more specifically for me, and this is where I’ll separate a journalist from an ABS-CBN employee, I would put it (story) on right away because I’m an ABS-CBN employee,” she said.

“I don’t think if my brother or sister is a murderer, I will allow a murderer loose in society,” she said, adding that at one point someone even asked her if ABS-CBN should run critical commentaries.

“I said, ‘Absolutely, you go look for those guys,’” she said.

The decision to run live telecasts of the tragedy and the inquiries was instinctive, according to her.

“It’s wrong not to run it, it is of public national interest,” she said.

Consciousness
Did Ressa’s instructions seep in among reporters and editors? Did they “cover this story and (wrote it) like (they) don’t work for ABS-CBN?”

One long-time media observer believed they did.

“All things considered, I think ABS-CBN did a fair job both as a news organization, and as a news subject,” said Vergel Santos, a columnist for BusinessWorld and a media critic. “If ABS-CBN was conscious at all, it was conscious not to give the impression that it was being overly defensive, or serving its own purposes.”  He also thought GMA-7 covered the story fairly.

“I think Channel 7 was conscious not to be seen as taking advantage of the situation, and ABS-CBN was conscious not to be seen as minimizing the situa-tion,” he said. That was why, he believed, ABS-CBN “ran everything.”

ANC ran live telecasts of the fact-finding inquiry on Sunday, the day after the tragedy, and on Tuesday, the day the probe body disclosed its findings. ABS-CBN suspended regular programming during the rest of that Saturday to give way to the coverage of the breaking story. ANC also ran live telecasts of the press conferences of ABS-CBN executives. By running an inquiry live, they believed there would be no opportunity for any TV network to put a spin to the news.

Yet Santos also observed that after the coverage of the breaking news event, when talk shows were mounted for a second look at the tragedy, ABS-CBN was at one point too defensive.

He thought that one ANC host was “interviewing people from far away places and (who were) only vaguely relevant to the issue.”

The point, he said, appeared to show that ABS-CBN has had events in other places that turned out well because of the good relationship between the company and the government agencies.

“(ABS-CBN was over-defensive) by trying to show… in a rather strained way, that while they might be principally responsible for the whole thing, they were not alone in the responsibility,” Santos said. This prompted him to call someone from ANC which, he said, took “the call very well.”

A big shift
That ANC ran live telecasts of the inquiry was an effort by ABS-CBN to be transparent,” according to Hofileña.

In the succeeding days, there might have been a reassessment of the coverage on Saturday, she said.

“The fact that they carried that live was for me a big shift because if you were—as a media corporation—really guarding your interests only as a company, you wouldn’t carry it live because it is an inquiry and because your executives and your people would be put on the spot,” she said.

She added that, “You cannot anticipate what questions would be asked and these people also would not be able to anticipate what questions would be asked of them. You don’t know how they would be reacting. But you thrust them into the spotlight (all the same).”

Also because a reporter operates on instinct, he reports what he sees and hears, according to Santos. A print reporter, in fact, would have more time to deliberate, to process the facts, before putting out a story—but not a broadcast reporter.

Augusto “Gus” Abelgas, a veteran ABS-CBN reporter, covered the subsequent govern-ment inquiry into the stampede. He was assigned to do the story about the probe body’s findings and recommendations. It was in one of these press conferences when the chief investigator, Interior Undersecretary Marius Corpus, stated that it was as if ABS-CBN offered a “slice of meat to a pack of wolves” when it decided to give away prizes to appease people who could no longer be accommodated inside the stadium.

Instinctively, Abelgas thought this was the angle of the story even though, personally, Corpus’s allegations had hurt him.

“That was the lead there. That was the best angle. I did not think about whether it would affect me or the company,” he said.

That Tuesday night, Abelgas’s story, which carried the main points of Corpus’s allegations, was TV Patrol’s banner story.

Difficult task
At the time the story broke out, Vice-President Noli de Castro was having his Saturday program at the station. He interspersed his show with news updates of the breaking story. It was still unclear which among the radio stations broke the story first.

Yet if it was also the job of reporters to ask the difficult and probing questions, one print reporter observed that on at least one occasion, during an earlier press conference by the fact-finding body, the ABS-CBN reporter around was not throwing the “critical” questions.  In fact, the ABS-CBN reporter was not asking questions at all, the print reporter said.

In the succeeding days, Wowowee would be temporarily replaced by a show hosted by entertainment hosts, among them Boy Abunda.  Ressa said the new program was an “entertain-ment show broken up by news breaks.”

No fine line
Both Santos and Hofileña felt that more efforts should have been made to “draw the line” between entertainment and media.

“It is confusing because it (news event) is being handled by an entertainment person. If I were the viewer, should I expect lower standards of coverage?” Hofileña said.

“That would be, in my book, straddling… I think TV should try as much as possible to draw a line as distinct as possible between news and entertainment,” Santos said, adding, “I think Maria (Ressa) should do something about that.”

As for the rest of the media industry that covered the stampede, Santos observed that:

• • Sometimes reporters were quoting just about anyone who has anything to say about the tragedy.
• • When an investigator said that members of the crowd were treated “like animals,” the reports did not clarify immediately that the statement was personal one made by the investigator. (One print reporter, however, remarked that the investigator merely stated what many—including media members—could not say openly).

Hofileña said she would have liked to see a story about how ABS-CBN covered the event in the pages of newspapers so that media can hold themselves accountable for their stories.

But members of the Philippine media are still uncomfortable with “criticizing one another,” she said. “I think there is that fear that we ourselves would not want to be criticized by our colleagues who we know can be the harshest of critics,” she said.

Santos said he would have liked to read a detailed chrono-logy of events to “see a clearer picture of what happened.”  Such an article or illustration could prove useful to media consumers and even to the investigators.

He would have also liked to qualify references to the victims of the tragedy as “poor people lured by quick money.”  There might have been quite a deal of stereotyping there, he said.

“Anybody likes quick money… every one of us,” Santos said.

ABS-CBN also tended to hold up Wowowee’s host, Willie Revillame, as “some sort of philanthropist and some sort of deserving idol.” The show was likewise projected as having nothing but the best of intentions when an overriding concern, according to Santos, was really to raise its ratings. n

(Note: Wowowee has resumed airing on ABS-CBN.)

Luige A. del Puerto is a reporter for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

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