Messaging

WHILE his boss is preparing his address to the nation after one year in office, Communications Secretary Martin Andanar has started circulating his own PCOO report. Its accomplishments include strengthening the signal of the government channel, improving DU30’s trust ratings among the A and B’s, increasing online following to one million, and launching products such as Mindanao Hour, a daily podcast with Mocha Uson, and a tabloid. The ultimate dream is to model the state-run network after the UK’s BBC. While waiting for that to happen, Radyo ng Bayan has been renamed Radyo Pilipinas.

I’d always believed that Secretary Andanar, because of his radio-TV background, favors the broadcast media over those of us in the print medium. Nothing to be guilty or ashamed of on either side, really, but when we sat down with him recently for a preview of his own pre-state of the nation report, I was surprised to hear him say he was proud that his 17-year-old daughter chose to do her practicum in journalism with a newspaper rather than a TV station. “I’m a broadcaster,” he declared, “but I’m not a writer. That’s why I’m glad Alexa is learning the ropes from Ichu Villanueva” of Philippine Star (where the column of Martin’s assistant secretary, Mocha, also appears). Printed or broadcast, communication succeeds when the message is current, clear, concise, and, most important, correctly worded.

For now, however, Martin’s comfort zone is operations rather than communications. After an unfortunate series of run-ins with media, he is now totally focused on “taking charge of operations,” leaving the communications part to Ernesto Abella, older and wiser, a pastor who speaks slowly, calmly, “in that deep baritone voice” as Martin described it. Under this setup, Mr. Andanar has elbow room to manage a colony of offices, agencies, subdepartments, and units held together by an alphabet soup of acronyms that read like Greek. Their tasks range from printing security paper for passports to meeting the challenge of providing intelligent but interesting programming on radio and TV throughout the day and night – and what a challenge!