IT COULD be an interesting day for motorists traveling in the North Luzon Expressway today. This is because of Eat Bulaga’s “Tamang Panahon” grand celebration at the Philippine Arena, 55,000-seater Iglesia ni Cristo owned stadium in Bulacan. “With the AlDub team, Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza (Yaya Dub), at the height of their popularity, thousands are expected to converge in this biggest arena of the country.
One would have thought that with the advent of the internet and social media, that television would now be a sunset industry. Apparently not, as we are now witnessing with the AlDub phenomenon.
Indeed, since its advent in the 1920s, television has become the preeminent social medium that shapes the behavior and transforms perceptions, beliefs, choices and opinions to life and stereotypes. Its transformative effect has become so pervasive and profound that its influence transcends cultural, ethnic and territorial boundaries. People have become so dependent on television for news, information, and entertainment that life is unimaginable without it. Advertisements and propaganda are powerful tools that affect people’s choices and perceptions. We only need to know the number of media and television personalities who have been catapulted to political prominence because of national television exposure.
Television is, however, not all about fun and entertainment. Among others, television plays a vital role in information transmission; however, it can also serve as a Janus-faced device that plays on the emotional and psychological state of its viewers. By watching typical news programs, we are inclined to say that news broadcasting is stereotypically negative in content. There is a tendency to overemphasize negativity and news sensationalism, capitalizing on the emotional content of the suffering of others.
In light of these, the scrutiny and examination of morality and ethics in televised mediation and how the divergent audiences respond to the display of suffering and poverty on television have been made the subject of academic inquiry. There are innumerable Western studies that lay down the normative framework on media and communications ethics. Theories and models attempting to explain the moral dynamics of the medium and its audience have been offered. In particular, approaches have been advanced to explain the ethical inquiry on how suffering and poverty are and should be depicted in media, and how they ethical impact on various media players.
Jonathan Corpus Ong, a brilliant young Filipino intellectual who lectures in the University of Leicester, grapples with these questions in his book “The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class Divided Philippines”. A sociologist (his PhD in sociology is from Cambridge) and communications specialist (he obtained his first degree in communications, summa cum laude, from Ateneo de Manila) by training, Ong essays an ethnographic Filipino perspective on how suffering and poverty are represented on television and how audiences belonging to different economic and social classes respond to this process of representation. His scholarly treatise offers a solid characterization of Filipino audiences’ consumption of televised suffering as they function within their respective social milieu.
What is unique about Ong’s approach is his use of ethnographic observation and interviews with different groups of audiences in Manila, providing him with empirical material of how a class-divergent local setting gives an explanation of poor’s strategic suffering on television and the elite’s disengagement from their undesirable others.
For example, in examining the popular noontime show “Wowowee” (also in the news because of the criminal charges that have been filed against its host Willie Revillame for alleged abuse of a minor) as an entertainment genre, Ong observes that audiences from different classes differently perceive the presence or absence of agency in the programs “sufferers.” For upper-class audiences, there is no or very little concern with the success or failure of a contestant over another. Ong suggests that this disinterest is rooted on the belief the contestants are homogenously poor and therefor equally deserving. Within this class, there is frequent reference to the exploitation by the sufferers. For lower and middle class audiences, the very act of queueing up a night before is paradoxically an indicator of both agency and victimhood.
On the newscasting front, Ong draws primarily from focus groups supplemented by expert interviews. He posits that news offers diverse forms of sufferings brought about by a variety of victims/ sufferers and situations— from individual to collective, man-made to natural disasters etc., unlike “Wowowee” “where programme conventions recognize and reward highly specific claims of victimhood in participant’s strategic suffering.”
The Poverty of Television concludes that class is an important determinant of television consumption even as television dynamically “shapes and reproduces class”. Ong points out how, in Philippine television’s practices of over-representing the poor and under- representing the elites, the media maintains and sometimes amplify class divides. His scholarly work uncovers that, in contrast to existing Western scholarship, Filipino upper-class respondents who avoid local television share much in common with a few Western experiences who regularly turn away from images of suffering.
At the same time, majority of Ong’s lower class respondents who live in poverty and identify themselves as suffering do not fit squarely with existing scholarship and conventional assumptions that greater affective consumption of suffering would lead to “desensitization”, indifference, and “compassion fatigue.” Ong observes, however, that lower-class Filipinos do not avoid suffering in the news and entertainment—rather, they seek it out, noting that they do not watch television to escape into the fantasy worlds of opulence and luxury but to “actively seek compassionate practices of recognition and redistribution for sufferers like them.” He contends that audiences responses to the image of suffering include both experiences of avoidance/ shock/indifference and affective consumption involving identification, hope and conferment of moral judgments. This everyday experience of poverty, as well as historical, social, cultural and religious beliefs about suffering, are important factors that shape how audiences respond.
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