by LUZ RIMBAN

CALL IT THE Media Midas Touch. When it came to news and current affairs programming, it seemed everything broadcast leader ABS-CBN touched turned to gold, at least ratings and revenue-wise. Shortly after reopening under the control of the Lopez family in 1986, the network had quickly captured the fancy of the then newly empowered masa with “TV Patrol,” the first Filipino language newscast on pre-primetime TV. Then came the public service program “Hoy! Gising!” whose loud and loquacious badgering of erring local officials met the audience’s demand for government accountability. In recent years, the infotainment show “Balitang K” has been keeping late afternoon viewers glued to their sets with stories that served to entertain more than anything else. TV and media critics carped about the shows’ contents, but the numbers were all too glowing for the network’s officials to care about anything else.

And so when ABS-CBN bigwigs last August 16 replaced the award-winning “The World Tonight,” Channel 2’s late evening news show, the expectation was the new program would be yet another audience and cash magnet. Derived from an old “TV Patrol” segment that examined the public pulse on current issues, “Pulso Aksyon Balita” was to be the station’s wake-upper in a sleeper of a timeslot—11 to 11:30 p.m.

But “Pulso” is rankling viewers more than it is raking them in. Rather than heralding another new trend in broadcast news, the all-Filipino news show appears to be proving that the local TV audience can only take so much from the so-called idiot box.

Media critics say “Pulso” signals the downward slide in the late evening news, the dumbing down of Philippine television. Viewers themselves are howling, saying that at the very least, they expect a news program to tell them the news. But that seems to be asking too much of “Pulso,” where reporters race through even the heaviest of issues in one minute flat, or the world news in a breathless 60 seconds. What makes it harder to take anything in the show too seriously is the penchant of anchors Ted Failon and Korina Sanchez to pepper the air with their unsolicited opinions.

“Pulso” even ends with a segment called “Kontra Bersya,” where the duo debates on the burning issue of the day. This is capped with a telephone survey that counts viewer opinion on current issues. Ponder this and phone in your answers now: How do you think Cebu Judge Martin Ocampo died? Press 1 if by suicide or 2 if by foul play. Whose rally are you attending on August 20, Cory Aquino and Cardinal Sin’s or Mike Velarde’s El Shaddai? Failon’s verdict on the results of that one: If the Church and Cory votes win, it is probably because Sin and Aquino supporters had telephones.

The result is that “Pulso” has so repulsed viewers that some have even taken to calling it palso (a failure). In recent months, newspapers have published letters from people disgusted with the program while the network itself has been deluged with letters and phone calls asking for the return of “The World Tonight.”

But the most tangible proof of the show’s loss of viewership has been the household ratings, which by its second month had dipped to seven percent from its start of 18 percent. Even advertisers stayed away. By mid-October, “Pulso’s” nightly commercial load plunged to as low as a minute and 45 seconds, possibly one of the lowest posted by any ABS-CBN news program ever. Even at its bleakest showing, insiders say, “The World Tonight” could muster at least three minutes of commercials.

ABS-CBN executives, however, are either unfazed by the reactions or as yet unwilling to accept defeat. “Birth pains,” is how “Pulso’s” creator and ABS-CBN’s self-proclaimed ideas man Jake Maderazo calls the negative feedback. The network’s corporate communications head Patricia Daza, for her part, would rather describe the dissenters “the loud minority” among the loyal “World Tonight” viewers, the uppercrust AB audience who, she says, have the time and the capacity to write letters or make phone calls to Channel 2.

These people are not really “Pulso’s” audience, insists Maderazo, adding, “They are few but they’re the thinking people, the crowd of ‘The World Tonight’.”