Philippine TV network goes dark
Media titan off the air after panel’s cease-and-desist order
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine government Tuesday ordered the country’s largest broadcasting network to halt operations, disrupting press freedom and the flow of information in the middle of the pandemic.
Media giant ABS-CBN signed off after its evening news broadcast, leaving the screens of millions of viewers black and the jobs of 11,000 employees in jeopardy.
A cease-and-desist order was issued by the National Telecommunications Commission earlier Tuesday, affecting television and radio operations. ABS-CBN’s cable news channel and digital operations will continue, albeit with a limited reach.
President Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly threatened to close down the network in the past. His office denied that he had a hand in the order, say- ing the decision was entirely up to the commission.
“ABS-CBN is free to exhaust all legal remedies available to it,” said presidential spokesman Harry Roque. Duterte “accepted the apology of the network and left its fate to both houses of Congress,” he added.
Duterte and his allies have accused ABS-CBN of not carrying his advertisements during the 2016 election campaign, instead airing those of his opponents. The network’s president, Carlo Katigbak, apologized to Duterte in February, clarifying the operations surrounding how the advertisements were aired.
The apology came amid congressional hearings on the renewal of ABS-CBN’s franchise, which lapsed Monday.
Before the cease-and-desist order was issued, the office of the solicitor general — the executive department’s top lawyer — warned the commission against allowing the network to operate temporarily.
Observers and government critics called the move a clampdown on dissent and said it was meant to single out the network. It is common practice for the commission to allow media organizations to continue operating even after government permissions have lapsed.
“It sends a clear message: What Duterte wants, Duterte gets,” the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said in a statement. “And it is clear, with this brazen move to shut down ABS-CBN, that he intends to silence the critical media and intimidate everyone else into submission.”
Lawmakers, including those aligned with the president, expressed reservations and criticized the order. The Senate and the House of Representatives produced a resolution and letter respectively, expressing their views that ABS-CBN should be allowed to operate while the franchise renewal was pending in Congress. The Justice Department had also released a legal opinion saying that the network could still broadcast.
Bills to renew the franchise were pending for months, and the commission previously assured Congress that it would give the network provisional authority to operate.
An independent senator, Sonny Angara, said the order would shut off an important information source that is “practically in the household of every Filipino,” and in the middle of a pandemic.
“Where are they going to get their news now?” he said in an interview with ABSCBN. “On the Internet, where there [is] fake news?”
In an interview with ABSCBN’s radio station DZMM, Edgardo Cabarios, deputy commissioner of the National Telecommunications Commission, said that only a court’s temporary restraining order could allow the network to resume operations.
While ABS-CBN carried on with live coverage of its own impending closure, a number of reporters and anchors took to Twitter to say that their work continues. “In the service of the Filipino,” they wrote, echoing the network’s tagline, “we remain.”
The network last went off the air in 1972, when then-President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and its owners were forced out. It reopened in 1986 after Marcos was ousted by the “people power” revolution.
“We will be back, just as we survived martial law,” ABS-CBN justice reporter Mike Navallo said on Twitter. “Let history and the Filipino people judge this moment.”