Meet the Robredos

By Andrew Jonathan S. Bagaoisan

(Shot by Anjo Bagaoisan)

“Salamat, Jesse Robredo” coverage log 2

NAGA CITY, CAMARINES SUR– For a week, this city became, in the words of Sec. Manuel Quezon III, the capital of the country.

The top stories centered here, just after Manila and its neighbors closed their ordeal with the Habagat floods.

While the stories focused on the man, the late Sec. Jesse Robredo, the spotlight also turned to the city and to the lives most connected to him.

They long lived in Robredo’s shadow. But the secretary’s life and death bagged Naga and his family a greater appreciation from many who met them by this tragedy.

The casket was no longer opened. Still, hundreds continued to come.

The casket soon had to be moved from a cramped corner of the chapel of the Archbishop’s Palace to the wider covered driveway outside.

There and later at the Basilica Minore, many noticed how orderly the Nagueños lined up and occupied the place.

(Shots by Anjo Bagaoisan)

Local businesses kept sending in food and drinks, to the point that organizers asked them to stop for the meantime.

Even for packed meals the locals quietly lined up for their share.

Reporters and anchors repeatedly hailed Naga’s rise from municipality to first-class city as a legacy of its former mayor.

More remarkable than that though is the discipline of the Nagueños formed not from fear or force, but from example.

Aika

Like his stint as mayor, Jesse Robredo worked below the radar as DILG secretary. He didn’t even bring his family to Manila.

Only during Robredo’s search and wake did the public and the media begin to get acquainted with his wife and three daughters.

Our news teams were assigned to get and prepare for a guest on the night Sec Jesse’s casket arrived at Naga.

Sec. Jesse returns home

By Andrew Jonathan S. Bagaoisan

“Salamat, Jesse Robredo” coverage log

(Shot by Anjo Bagaoisan)

NAGA CITY, CAMARINES SUR—“Are you sure this is it?”

The Manila-based media came looking for a mansion inside a gated subdivision. What they found was an apartment compound just a few turns from one of Naga City’s main roads.

A vacant lot of trees and untouched greenery fronted the compound. The neighbors were gated houses you would find in middle-class areas.

There was no tell-tale marker. No posters, and aside from a Couples For Christ tile, no name-plates.

Beyond the police checkpoints (likely put up during the previous nights) and waiting tents nearby, no one would think it the residence of a VIP.

The attention around it still made clear this was indeed where Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo, pride of Naga, lived.

A three-floor brick-and-granite building dominated the compound—the Robredos’ unit.

(Shot by Anjo Bagaoisan)

Outside its door, bars enclosed a small receiving area where pictures of Sec. Jess hung. Here and there getting awards from four Philippine presidents, one a blessing from Pope John Paul II, and the biggest, a group pose with President Benigno Aquino.

Five adjacent flats faced the building–houses the family was renting out.

Our news team arrived there two days after Robredo’s plane crashed off the coast of Masbate City.

We were to keep tabs on the secretary’s family and the supporters that poured in as they waited for news.

Dolphy and ACJ: End of two eras

By Andrew Jonathan S. Bagaoisan

Rodolfo “Dolphy” Quizon and Angelo Castro, Jr. (Courtesy: ABS-CBN)

From Makati Med to Heritage Park, they did not end. The ordinary and the famed both came to pay their respects to this great. And when time or distance prevented, Filipinos tipped their hats to Dolphy all the way to cyberspace.

The King of Comedy’s final days saw a nostalgia trip in pop culture as his past performances made a comeback on TV.

With that, the tributes on Twitter and Facebook recalled Dolphy’s unforgettable characters and their impact on generations of viewers.

Similar sentiments echoed as our reporters took the pulse of those who showed up at the hospital and the memorial park.

It was no different back in April when another TV luminary, anchorman Angelo Castro, Jr. passed away.

The physical line was shorter, the media noise less, but the collective recollection streamed nonetheless—especially online.

Viewers old enough to remember revisited the days when newscasts in English were still the norm for late-night.

Salamat, Tito Dolphy at ABS-CBN’s Dolphy Theater (Videos upon clicking – Shot by Anjo Bagaoisan)

In Dolphy’s wake, Filipinos resurrected John Puruntong and Pacifica Falayfay.

The deaths of famous people conjure up not just personal memories of them, but also the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times) during their heyday in the public eye.

And now in this age of the digital village, we have realized all the more a shared loss of one less character who embodied our hopes and experiences.

With the loss of figures like Dolphy and Angelo Castro, we are also nudged to look back to their times and reflect how things have differed since.

The night Dolphy died

By Andrew Jonathan S. Bagaoisan

Sol Aragones breaking Dolphy’s death on ABS-CBN News Patrol. (Shot by Anjo Bagaoisan)

I will remember where I was when I learned we lost Dolphy.

The big story that day was the extreme traffic wrought by keeping the Metro Manila buses along one lane of EDSA. Our van was at a concrete island on the turn to Quezon Avenue from EDSA.

After we aired a live report for TV Patrol, the news desk told us to stay put while deciding if we would do another for the 11 p.m. newscast.

It was nearly 9 and raining. A crew mate and I were already settling down from dinner, shut in our crew cab.

The desk editor on duty called. “Who’s on standby at Makati Med?”

I gave the name. “Okay. You get ready too,” he said, and hanged up. I called our guy at Makati Medical Center.

“Nag-tweet na si Ruffa,” he said. “Nag-aabangan na dito.”

We read Ruffa Gutierrez’s post via a workmate’s Blackberry: “R.I.P Ninong Dolphy.”

The Net was already abuzz, but no one was yet confirming it.

Commentators on DZMM radio were still bantering about the traffic, cryptically telling listeners who texted queries, “Please wait. We still don’t know.”

At the ABS-CBN newsroom: Monitoring TV channels covering Dolphy. (Shot by Anjo Bagaoisan)

By then, we were told to pack up, pick up some hardware at the base, and proceed to Makati Med. Another crew watching traffic elsewhere in EDSA was diverted there too.

The TV news break greeted us when we got to ABS-CBN. Dolphy’s partner, Zsa Zsa Padilla, confirmed that Dolphy had indeed passed away.

And just like that, our headlines quickly shifted gears from commuting to the loss of a showbiz great.

Chasing Fallen Stars: How television news covers the death of celebrities

(NOTE: I wrote this with two Journalism classmates as our final case study in Journalism Ethics [ J 192] class under Prof. Yvonne T. Chua in March 2009.

Celebrity news, largely a mix of glamour, PR, and scandal, is rarely looked at as an area for responsible reporting. But it is a staple in Philippine media relegated to the end segment of newscasts or the E-section of papers.

But what happens when showbiz lands the top story? We looked at how TV news covered the deaths of celebrities, the coverage of which is as sensitive as covering deaths in the general public.

Two happened twice before this final paper was assigned, which we compared to a highly-remembered one which occurred a decade ago from today’s writing.

DISCLOSURE: I am now an employee of ABS-CBN News. Roehl, one of my co-writers, works for GMA News.)

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CHASING FALLEN STARS

How television news covers the death of celebrities

By Andrew Jonathan Bagaoisan, Roehl Niño Bautista and Annamaebelle Bernal

(First of two parts)

Grab from Yan’s memorial service aired live on ABS-CBN.

It was a non-stop six-hour affair made for television. At the funeral mass for matinee idol Rico Yan, singer-performer Gary Valenciano moved people to tears rendering “Warrior is a child,” the actor’s favorite song.

Priest Tito Caluag, in his homily, told mourners how Yan dreamed of becoming president. “Rico wanted to be a leader but never mentioned leadership because he only wanted to serve,” said Caluag.

For the climax of a week-long drama captured by television, the service was just the beginning.

From the thousands who held vigil at the wake, thousands of others went outside their homes and waited at the roadside where the convoy en-route to the young actor’s final resting place was about to pass, just to see the car that carried the famous lad’s mortal shell. People cried for the loss of an idol, a friend, a family member, and these with all other drama were shown on national television.

News personalities of ABS-CBN, Yan’s home network, stationed at key areas of the convoy to report live every stage of the procession on ground while the station’s “Sky Patrol” helicopter followed the whole procession from La Salle Green Hills to Manila Memorial Park on camera. It definitely wasn’t ordinary for a burial coverage to last that long.

But Yan’s death in March 2002 was not the only newsworthy event as television news made it to be with its “unprecedented” and “overwhelming” coverage, as a newspaper put it.

Attention to Yan’s demise pushed to the side stories like the Baseco Compound fire which displaced around 3,000 families, a dry-dock accident in Dubai that left eight Filipinos dead and eight more missing, and the deaths of National Artists for Music Levi Celerio and Lucio San Pedro, and Britain’s Queen Mother.

Celebrities make the news. Deaths also make the news. Put those two together and the media is put in a tight spot when it comes to ethics. If covering famous personalities is already problematic, covering celebrities who died is even trickier, when the newsworthy elements of the two combine but their at-times incompatible values clash.

In a country where showbiz news is a daily television staple presented under the guise of journalism, the nuances of covering celebrity deaths are largely unexplored in depth or remiss in guidelines.