GAMES OF CHANCE AND DEATH: THE WOWOWEE STORY

(article first appeared in Newsbreak Magazine, March 26, 2006. It is being reprinted to celebrate the announcement that the noontime game show is being ended July 30, 2010.)

In the past, angry parents, women’s organizations, consumer activists, and civil societies would call the networks and write into Letters to the Editors to complain about a lurid game show host or dancing by skimpily clad prepubescent girls. In a few rare instances, the host was censured and suspended for a week. For the most part, the complainers got sympathetic nods from the networks’ PR departments and from anguish ridden ad executives. Yet the toilet jokes, the anti-women, anti-gay remarks, the simulated sex acts, the dangling of free cell phones and other vulgarities continue airing every day to millions of children and adults.

But now there are 74 people dead, crushed by a stampede, mostly older women and children,and hundreds injured all because they wanted to join the Wowowee Game Show. The complaints in the past have been overshadowed; Now we’re talking homicide and criminal negligence. The government, in an unusual show of public interest, possibly fueled by revenge, is talking about canceling TV licenses. The knives are out and it’s being directed at ABS-CBN, the network that carries Wowowee.

Media pundits and talk show analysts skirt around the central issue, in fact, the crux of the matter. They’ll go so far as to utter the words crass commercialism so as not to offend prickly ad sponsors lying low these days hoping the matter blows over in a few weeks.

To get to the bottom of things, one should recall the old investigative journalism adage: “Follow the Money Trail.” The trail does not lead to nor end at ABS-CBN or its rival networks. It may seem that way because they’re handing out million peso cash prizes and keys to houses and jeepneys. But that money isn’t theirs.

The trail winds past the networks and goes straight to the boardrooms of the largest corporations in this country and abroad. Corporations spent 139.32 billlion pesos for advertising expenditures last year to introduce and sell their products. Of this, 75% or 105.18 billion pesos were spent on television advertising in shows like Wowowee. In the old days, a budding entrepreneur would travel the land, visit a town, set up a tent and chairs and hawk his snake-oil or new contraption by giving the public a close-up look and a sample taste.

These days, it’s television with the game show host as the new huckster. The game show format was invented and a bunch of dolled up sex objects thrown in to spice things up. In a poor country, dangling dreams, sexual or cellular, inane and humiliating contests, and instant cash with the sub message of buy-that-hair-conditioner-or-boyfriend-dumps-you seem pretty effective.

The game show format either gets pitched by the networks or TV production companies or even by corporate marketing departments who throw in things like making people text - at 15 pesos a pop - what the correct answer is to the game show host’s question of the day. In return, one could win up to 25,000 pesos in load. Just by being smart, and of course, tuning in to the show. What these marketing mavens ignore is that 999% of the texters will lose and there goes the daily sahud which should be spent feeding the kids.

The selection of a game show host is crucial. He’s got to be affable, knows how to massage the crowd, and if he’s ambisexual, or she’s done a Vicky Belo, even better. You then pack the TV studio with jobless people, most of them desperate women who need to feed six kids, (five more than she could possibly feed but no one told her about contraception) or school kids who should be on an educational field trip. You add blaring music, juice up the crowd, applause on command and you have the perfect selling conduit called The Game Show.

If you took a poll though of the leading CEO’s who underwrite these shows, and the network executives who air them and the advertising shysters who created the spots, you’d probably find out that they, their spouses, their children, their families, their friends, wouldn’t be caught dead watching them.

After all, these folks have sterling pedigree, been sent to the best schools abroad, are fairly cultured and prefer American public television. Some of them may even be Opus Dei devotees and wouldn’t tolerate the show’s sexual crudeness. And they’ll never allow their daughters or their gay sons to date the likes of a foul-mouthed show host like Wowowee’s Willie Revillame. Worst of all, the show’s in the native language, and that makes it a pain to understand.

That’s the crux of the matter. These corporations proclaim their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) credo of dignifying the poor and teaching them self-reliance. These same corporations may also be members to enlightened clubs like the Philippine Business For Social Progress whose vision bear similar credos. Yet, the sordid fact is these corporations sponsor sleazy, offensive, and parasitic game shows totally discordant with the credos they purportedly espouse. For them personally, these corporate executives sponsor game shows so far removed from their sanitized Tatler lives.

Deborah Doane, Chair of CORE (Corporate Responsibility) Coalition of over 130 NGOs, in the UK, wrote an article entitled The Myth of CSR in the fall 2005 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She confirms this “disconnect” between a corporation’s CSR and their actual practice by describing CSR as a “placebo,” which simplifies and overlooks the complexity and challenges between corporate profit-taking and the social good. Except in a few cases, corporations worldwide with CSR seals have yet to prove that they “walk the talk.” Her recommendation? A set of Principles drafted for American and UK companies which include “Corporations shall accrue fair profits for shareholders but not at the expense of the legitimate interests of other stakeholders.” In the Philippine setting the stakeholders are the poor who have the right to jobs rather than the right to be lucky and demeaned in the process.

For now, with poor women and children having senselessly died for the illusion of a quick fix, there had better be serious pause in Makati corporate boardrooms, and in the television and advertising conference rooms of their co-dependent accomplices. Like it or not, guilty or not, said or unsaid, public perception has laid the deaths of these people and the injury of hundreds on their doorstep.

It isn’t too much to ask corporate executives to remember their own satisfaction at seeing good, educational, cultural, and inspiring TV shows and applying that to local programming. The notion that marketing follows mass interests is a canard, lazy thinking and downright insulting to the public. Every day, I see thousands of poor children stroll through the National Museum, and without benefit of an arts appreciation class, revel and delight at the artworks and artifacts in the galleries. The poor can distinguish what is beautiful and what it takes to better their lives. The noon-time TV fare that dominates the airwaves are against anything beautiful and dignified and uplifting. Instead, the suckered poor public get debasing and moronic shows with not an iota of formative values. So, when a stampede occurs, we shed some tears but blame the victims for their lack of “conduct and good manners.”

TV game shows may have their sycophants and detractors. But it cannot escape the new adjective of being deadly and injurious. The time for fundamentally reviewing and replacing these sordid games of chance and death is now upon their makers.