Passionate Revolutions by Talitha Espiritu

Author:Talitha Espiritu [Espiritu, Talitha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Political Science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
ISBN: 9780896804982
Google: _SxzDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2017-04-15T03:17:31+00:00

Chapter 5

THE MEDIA AND THE SECOND COMING OF THE FIRST QUARTER STORM

Marcos’s June 30, 1981, inaugural celebration was a made-for-TV spectacular dubbed “Ako ay Pilipino” [I am the new Filipino]: Rites of the New Republic.” If the Marcos regime were to be believed, 30 million television viewers, or nearly three-fourths of the population, saw the live telecast of Marcos’s swearing in at the Luneta grandstand.1 Twenty-eight state visitors, including U.S. vice president George H. W. Bush, were present to watch an event that climaxed with a thousand-voice male chorus singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. “And he shall reign forever and ever.”2

Panorama, the Sunday supplement to Manila’s Bulletin Today, duly featured the inaugural. On the cover of the July 12, 1981, issue were three black-and-white photographs of the president, one in each of his inaugurations—1965, 1969, and 1981. Compared to the high production values of “Ako ay Pilipino,” the Panorama cover seemed almost insipid. And, given the intense coverage that the inaugural had already received in the establishment press, nobody expected anything out of the ordinary from the magazine. But when editor Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc’s story “There Goes the New Society, Welcome the New Republic” prompted the Ministry of Justice, the chairman of COMELEC, and the secretary-general of the KBL to threaten Bulletin/Panorama publisher Hans Menzi with “seditious libel” (and thereby force Magsanoc to resign), the offending Panorama issue became an instant collector’s item. But “it was more than that,” veteran journalist Marcelino B. Soriano points out. Magsanoc’s swan song “marked an awakening of the journalism profession.”3

Magsanoc’s controversial article briefly mentions Presidential Decree 1737, issued in September 1980. The act authorized Marcos to direct the “closure of subversive publications or other media of mass communications.” Magsanoc’s reflexive dig at the legal measure intended to muzzle the media in the New Republic is followed by the ironic statement: “Yet with all the awesome powers at his disposal, [Marcos] needed, he said, to go before the people ‘to be judged’ on his performance in office for 16 consecutive years.” Hinting at the fraudulence of the election, Magsanoc would draw the full ire of the regime with the following concluding lines: “The problem is a Marcos who with all his powers is powerless before corruption and the corruptors. It is a Marcos astride the same tired tiger (the discarded and discredited New Society) carrying on under a different name, the New Republic. If that continues, the Filipino, docile as he has been as the carabao [water buffalo] these 16 years cannot but give way and tear at the Republic.”4

Magsanoc’s acerbic piece was a bomba. Largely dormant since the imposition of martial law, the bomba occasionally appeared in the crony media; but it was largely used to “expose” the nefarious activities of the elite opposition. Magsanoc’s impudent digs at “corruption and corruptors” within the regime was much more than a simple shift in bomba targets. The suggestion that the all-powerful Marcos was in fact “powerless” called into question the very linchpin of Marcos’s national family.

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