Death of 11,071 dreams

To say that the past week was a struggle is an understatement. It has been more than a week since I’ve been skipping my daily dose of news and op-eds from my digital subscription of broadsheets Philippine STAR and Philippine Daily Inquirer. For at least the previous nine days, sleepless nights became quotidian, waking up to a nightmare was no longer figurative, and crying was nearly as usual as eating. And these aren’t exaggerations. Ask any one of the 11,071 ABS-CBN employees.

On July 10, 2020, the House of Representatives — specifically, the committees on legislative franchises and good government, and some ex-officio members — “killed” the franchise of ABS-CBN with 70 yes votes, 11 no votes, one abstention, and two inhibitions, despite various government agencies invited as resource persons in an unprecedented two-month-long hearing clearing the country’s largest media network of alleged violations.

Further reading:

Five days after then, the top brass of the broadcast firm — President and Chief Executive Officer Carlo L. Katigbak, Chief Operating Officer of Broadcast Cory V. Vidanes, and Chairman Mark L. Lopez, all of whom painstakingly bore the brunt of the disrespectful, glib, and accusatory inquiry of honorable representatives in Congress — faced their employees in an internal townhall video conference, announcing the inevitable retrenchment. The public statement came shortly after.

Social media feeds then began flowing with posts from employees recounting happy memories in the network, admitting the uncertainty they feel as they lose their livelihood and second home in the midst of a pandemic that has already rendered millions of Filipinos unemployed, and bidding their goodbyes — or “signing off” — with apparent hurt and dismay.

With the denial of the franchise, ABS-CBN lost its major revenue-generating platforms, just as the public grapples with the loss of a massive network of public service.

Several units are wiped out, and projects that started off as ambitious and eventually turned out to be impactful are affected, among which:

  • ABS-CBN’s film restoration and archives unit, whose efforts to preserve classic Filipino films and our cultural heritage are unmatched, as this costly endeavor falls far back in the list of the government’s priorities;
  • the ABS-CBN Philharmonic Orchestra, which provide training opportunities for young musicians and bring the oft-considered elitist classical music genre to a wider audience;
  • Bantay Bata 163, a child protection program initiated by the late Environment Secretary Gina Lopez, which was forced to discontinue some of its services, such as the provision of medical assistance and the acceptance of new scholars;
  • various educational, informational, and investigative programs that air comprehensive stories on a wide range of issues — which would otherwise not have a platform in time-strapped nightly news programs — that could no longer produce new episodes; and, not least of all,
  • ABS-CBN’s regional newsrooms, whence Filipinos in rural areas get their primary source of information.

Further reading:

Thousands of employees and third-party suppliers as well as their families are suffering, and millions of Filipinos are denied service — all due to an institutionalized sycophancy that enabled government officials to unconscionably vote against the public they were supposed to represent and a fragile ego of a man who had repeatedly threatened the network and the press in general. •