10.00.00 | Noli de Castro - Anchor woman
Make up/ woman/ floor manager etc | v/o Brash, energetic... aggravating ... shallow
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| sot... Tv studio
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| VARIOUS NEWSROOM energetic, noisy | v/o Journalism in The Philippines is rough, raw and competitive... |
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| Clip From ABS - CBN News | From ABS-CBN news and public affairs, here comes Noli de Castro...
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| v/o But unlike news in much of this part of the world, it is at least free of censorship.
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| .. in the latest and best national newscast, via satellite, the real national newscast: TV Patrol.
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| Noli's welcome piece and Music/Pix sting | Good evening my coutryman. ‘No retreat, no surrender' against the gambling lords..
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| Noli v/o MAP .. fade under two-way radio conversation
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| Gus Abergara, journalist in car | v/o Gus Abergara is a road reporter for TV patrol .. far and away he Philippines' most popular programme.
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| Drive up to Prison Guard post | His beat's justice .. and in a country obsessed with shoot outs, corruption and scandals, it's a busy beat. Sot ..
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| Car pulls up at check point | Guard: Who do you want to see?
Gus: We're supposed to see the prison governor.
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01.20 | Arrival at prison from the interior of car | v/o Gus is after two stories today - the shooting to death of a prisoner by prison guards...
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| Gus gets out of car | sot ...
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| Walk across tarmac to prison | v/o ... and a brewing scandal involving a movie star serving fourteen years behind bars.
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| Gus at front desk, chatting to guard
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| Walk through prison gates | Just getting into prison is almost impossible for most .. but good contacts and the clout of TV Patrol is all it takes for Gus.
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| But it is not always easy.
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02.02 | Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos on balcony | By the time the dictator Ferdinand Marcos - along with his wife and side kick Imelda - was overthrown a decade ago, Filipino journalism has been stifled by fourteen years of martial law.
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| Sheila Coronel, journalist | I became a journalist in the last years of Marcos and during that time it was a cat and mouse game. When Marcos wasn't looking we came out with stories we thought were the real stories. But when he was mad we'd revert into movies or retaurants or flimsy frivolous stuff just to be able to continue writing.
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| File footage: People Power Revolution
| sot... revolutionary noises
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02.50 |
| v/o People power raised Cory Aquino - the woman in yellow - to a sort of Filipino Joan of Arc status - an extraordinary revolution covered almost minute by minute by the international news media.
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| After the long years of Marcos, freedom of speech was born in the Philippines ten years ago .. no sooner had she moved into the Malacanang Palace than Cory Aquino lifted restrictions and gave birth to the region's most unruly media.
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| But like an adolescent child, today's Filipino media shows signs both of early promise .. and of a truly rebellious nature.
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03.36 | Sheila Coronel, journalist | I think generally Filipino journalists rose up to the challenges of that moment, but I think afterwards when there was a need to do more in-depth reporting that wasn't just about events as they happen, but also about the causes of events, about trends, about the meaning of events, the context in which events happen, then I don't think we've performed very well. Journalism has tended to be very sensationalistic. People think in terms of flashing headlines.
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04.16 | Prison, barbed wire etc Robin Padilla (movie star) arrives .. meets Gus | v/o Gus from TV Patrol has found his flashing headline.
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| He's talked his way into the prison compound .. to meet incarcerated movie heart throb, Robin Padilla.
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| Gus interviewing Robin | sot...
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| Robin: I hope the news media stops stepping on my head now.
Gus: We hope we can help in that way.
Robin: I've been through too much.
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| Sot.. gunfire
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| v/o Robin's an action hero...
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| Unfortunately, Robin took his screen persona just a little too seriously. He's been doing 14 years jail after being caught with a real assault rifle which he kept, he says, for his own protection.
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| Robin and Gus in doorway | Robin: I do not really like to talk to reporters now, but I cannot say no to him.
Question: Just to Gus?
Robin: Yeah, because he's tough ... (laugh)
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| v/o A star, any star. Filipinos and their news media are starstruck.
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05.22 | Shopping Mall | And here is the most unlikely star of all - Imelda Marcos.
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| You'd hardly believe she was drummed out of the country a decade ago. Accused of corruption, of theft, of human rights abuses.
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| Today a widow - she's back from exile, has a legion of starstruck followers and now makes light of such past embarrassments as the thousands of pairs of shoes discovered after she fled from her palace in 1986.
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06.00 | Sheila Coronel | She's a star. It's the celebrity syndrome. She says outrageous things, she wears outrageous clothes. She's a caricature and the media as you know like that.
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| Imelda Marcos | You'd be surprised because I have more shoes now than before, because after all they thought I'd been deprived of my shoes, then everybody from abroad thinks I'm shoeless so they bring shoes.
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| Sheila Coronel v/o | It's the scent of her perfume, the size of her heels, the padded shoulders, it's everything. She's a spectacle .. and the media loves spectacle.
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06.59 |
| v/o If the media has delighted in building Imelda into a star, it has taken just as much delight in bringing down a former hero - Cory Aquino.
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| Church scene | As the widow of the popular leader, Benigno Aquino who was assassinated 13 years ago, Cory used the media in her rise to power - but as President - soon felt the sting of its tongue.
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07.25 | Cory Aquino | Well, I suppose it's that way especially coming after the dictatorship. All the frustrations and emotions that were prevented from coming out - suddenly saw freedom. There were times when I was very hurt. I would not be human if I did not feel the hurt and the pain. But on the other hand, as I said, better to have an unbridled press, than to have no press freedom at all.
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07.55 | Chris Aquino on TV | He's already given me the best gift I could hope for.
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| V/o The Aquino reputation has not been enhanced by Cory's daughter .. Chris, the movie star.
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| Sot... screams etc
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| By contrast Cory's daughter Chris has managed to trade on the Aquino name with a peculiarly Filipino mix of show biz, sex and news media.
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08.25 |
| As Manila's answer to Ophrah Winfrey, Chris delighted her huge audience and the news media - but aggravated her mother - by having a televised kiss and make up session with Marcos's son Bong Bong.
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| Sot.. kissing and applause
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| The media also had a field day when she appalled her mother further by bearing a child out of wedlock to her married co-star .. and then proceeded to dramatise it all on her own show.
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| Sot.. Chris crying
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09.20 | Gus at prison | Meanwhile Gus is off to pursue his other story. That one about the prisoner who guards shot to death after he reportedly ran amok.
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| Prisoners leap and wave at cameras | The prisoners are delighted to see TV Patrol .. it's as popular here as anywhere else in the country, nightly drawing a regular 60 per cent of the Philippines' audience - figures which programme managers anywhere in the world would kill for.
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09.55 | Busy newsroom | sot.. newsroom
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| Newspapers, radio .. or television.. the day to day scandal, corruption and action on the streets is the constant diet .. consumed by an audience that just doesn't seem to get enough of it.
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| Sot... newsroom
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10.10 | Jake Madirazo with newsroom staff | TV Patrol's news editor, Jake Madirazo says it's all part of the media growing up .. just as democracy is also growing up in the Philippines...
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| Jake Madirazo, TV Patrol News Editor | Well, when you are number 1 you become powerful. But you would see the spirit in the people. The way they work - you'll see us executing our news cast. Actually if you ask me - it's more of event reporting. We haven't gone into anything that's scandalous like special investigative although we've done pieces like that before. By just event reporting we still encounter some criticisms. We haven't gone into the BBC type or the hard-copy type and they say we are tabloidish. Maybe they're panicking.
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011.12 | Sheila Coronel | I'm very disappointed with TV Patrol because it set the standard for news reporting at least in the early evening slot. Because they've moved towards crime and entertainment - and they were rating so highly so all the other stations had to follow. So that meant there was no space for serious reporting.
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| Edit suite | sot...
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| v/o Driven by a tight deadline and the clear-cut demands of a popular, tabloid-style news that Filipinos clearly love, Gus has no doubts about his angle... in the end, it is of course the movie star and not the dead inmate who's going to make it to air...
... that's the scoop.
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12.00 | Father Reuter | How many heroic journalists do we have? At the moment I don't think we have very many.
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| V/o In 1986 he co-ordinated the brave and defiant reporting of the People Power revolution on the Catholic networks, Radio Veritas.
He's a disappointed man today and a vehment critic of what the media has become.
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12.30 | Father Reuter v/o | Those who are in the media are doing it for the bread. They do not understand that they are the leaders of men. It seems to me the politicians are using media and the businessmen who have an axe to grind are using media. And the foreign forces that want to do things to Asia and the world, they are using media. I think media is being used universally.
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| Night shots of traffic | sot.. traffic
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| v/o Somewhere just outside the Manila city limits..
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| People sit and wait in the shadows | sot..
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| Gigi Grande, journalist from TV Patrol, waiting in shadows | TV Patrol's Gigi Grande is hoping for the big one.
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| Gigi Grande, journalist | We've been here for about 4 and half hours already. We got here about 11 o'clock this evening and it's now 3.30 in the morning. We were going to look for the third most wanted criminal in Bataan and this guy is accused of raping an 11 year old retarded child. So they are trying to apprehend him this morning.
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| Police in shadows | v/o Like the politicians, the bureaucrats and the rich and the powerful, the police too, use the media to promote their own agenda...
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| Dawn shot | Accused of corruption and of slaying rather than arresting criminals, they're hoping for a bit of good publicity - for a change.
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| ‘Operation Dragnet' | sot...
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| Unfortunately for the police .. such hopes will prove fruitless this time...
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| After 8 hours, they move in...
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| The local slum dwellers have never seen anything like it - except of course on TV Patrol.
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14.40 |
| To the immense chagrin of the Police Captain, the bird has already flown the coop.
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| Sot... Police Captain explaining mess up
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| Police report segment on TV Patrol | Tonight on police report....
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| v/o A decade of democracy and free speech has not dulled the sheer pleasure Filipinos find in being able to take a crack at authority to get away with it. Journalists may not live up to responsibilities that come with freedom, but they may come with maturity.
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15.30 | Sheila Coronel | I think it's an exciting period to be a journalist in the Philippines because we can define the kind of press we want to a certain extent. And we can have a vision of what we want things to be like, and we can do something, and we can be effective.
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ENDS. |
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