Monique Wilson, a respected stage actress, writes about Willie Revillame and TV entertainment.
The debate is no longer whether it was child abuse or not. The facts are plain to see. No one with a sense of respect for another human being can dispute that. The discourse now is how we, as Filipinos, as artists involved in the same industry that created Willy and shows like his, could have allowed this to go on for as long as it has. And what is our individual and collective participation in it?
Let’s talk honestly about our TV networks. The culprit now is TV 5 – with its’ blatant lack of decency by even hiring someone like Willy Revillame – a callous, insensitive individual who preys on the needs of poor, uneducated Filipinos. They hired him for ratings and money at the expense of the integrity, dignity and self-respect of the most vulnerable in our society.
Now wasn’t Channel 2 guilty of the very
same thing? Let’s observe very closely many other game shows and reality shows across all the networks – can we not deduce very overt similarities? Those networks are propelled by greed – ratings, money! Is there really, in all honesty, a local network that can claim they put human values above all that? I don’t think so. I turn on the television to watch local show and I feel uncomfortable. We have news reports that are horrifyingly biased and sensationalist. We have noon time variety shows that exploit women and insult our intelligence. We have talk shows that are intrusive, subjective and tasteless – the list goes on and on.
I am not saying, of course, that all shows fall beneath our standards of human decency. There are some TV shows that go against the grain, break the boundaries and give us quality – but they are so few. Even how the networks create the demarcation lines – A and B for middle and upper class, C and D for lower class? What kind of senseless market segmentation is that? It’s like saying, depending on what “class” you belong to, you cannot “appreciate” certain kinds of shows. This insults me as it should insult everybody. This is one of the roots of the problem. ALL our TV networks dumb down audiences in one way or the other. They keep the lines segregated.
TV has become our common culture in the Philippines. It should be used to EDUCATE, EMPOWER, INSPIRE, AWAKEN. But when you see shows like “Willing Willie” – and many other similar shows – they do the opposite. They dumb down audiences. They disempower them by creating a mendicant society with game shows that promise “quick money.” They keep them dependent on handouts, instead of creating opportunities for them to build skills. There is nothing inspiring about this. And now, we can all rant and rave, but unless we do something concrete about our rage – we will just be passive bystanders.
We can do just ONE thing. That is better than doing nothing at all. Whether that be creating an online petition to deliver to TV 5, CRH or DSWD, or whether we boycott the sponsors of the show/s, or write letters to all our newspapers, or make our voices heard with your local congress representatives and let them know this is unacceptable to us.
There are international standards we must insist on when it comes to our local entertainment industry. Why should we settle for anything less? We are part of the creation of our artistic culture. We must not allow it to be used for the continued exploitation of our fellow Filipinos.