TO BE BLUNT about it, President Rodrigo Duterte could disenfranchise the country’s top broadcasting network, ABS-CBN Corp., which allegedly failed to air his ad during the 2016 campaign period.
He could ask Congress to reject ABS-CBN’s application for the renewal of its legislative franchise. What’s on the viewfinder, however, is the face of Solicitor General Jose Calida, who had filed a quo warranto petition against ABS-CBN on the pretext that its franchise was “void from the beginning due to violations of law.”
Calida had first used the same tool that led to the ouster of former Supreme Court (SC) Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno.
Calida himself, unfortunately, casts a bad image because of the “conflict of interest” he is accused of for owning a security agency that has bagged multimillion-peso contracts with government offices, punishable under Republic Act 6713 or the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees.
But Duterte could restrain Calida to project an image of his government as a democracy still. Why risk incurring the ire of millions of his “believers” who could also be followers of the media giant?
ABS-CBN has thousands of employees and talents with many more dependents who could go hungry and angry.
As lawyer Romel Duron (an Iloilo City councilor) was telling us, the network may just be sued for violations of law and be allowed to renew its franchise for the good of everybody.
Closure is nothing new to ABS-CBN. The late President Ferdinand Marcos shut it down upon declaring martial law in 1972 but allowed it to resume with “friendlier” commentators.
Meanwhile, let me treasure a little nostalgia at the age of three in 1953. The first “music” that I heard on the radio was “Mambo Magsaysay,” the campaign jingle for then presidential candidate Ramon Magsaysay, who was running against re-electionist President Elpidio Quirino.
If I remember right, there were four Manila-based radio stations heard loud and clear in our barangay in Antique at that time, DZRH, DZBB, and DZAQ. DZXL would beam a few years later.
The call name DZXL was used first by Chronicle Broadcasting Network (CBN). It would eventually be turned over to Radio Mindanao Network (RMN).
DZAQ, the pioneer radio station of Alto Broadcasting System (ABS), began airing in 1953.
In the late 1950s, I became an avid listener of the daily noontime show “Student Canteen” on CBN’s DZXL – a live amateur singing contest hosted by Eddie Ilarde and Leila Benitez. They would often say they could also be seen on CBN-TV Channel 9.
And so when I first came to Manila for vacation at age 10 in 1960, I had myself accompanied by an uncle to the CBN radio-TV studio on Aduana Street to watch the show live. My uncle explained that the two cameras behind the hosts were catching the view as seen by home viewers.
One other TV studio, ABS-TV Channel 3, was showing a more popular weekly singing competition, Tawag ng Tanghalan. I had to go to the house of a neighbor one night to view black-and-white TV for the first time.
By then, Alto Broadcasting System (ABS) and Chronicle Broadcasting Network (CBN) were competing furiously against each other for both TV and radio audience. Because of TV’s emerging popularity creeping to neighboring provinces, soon there would be other competitors.
I was already a college student in Manila in 1967 when ABS and CBN merged into one company, ABS-CBN, and initially put up a one-story building covering an entire block on Bohol Avenue, Quezon City.
The rest is history. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
