THAT THESE shows all have the sound and feel of radio is no accident. With the lifestyles of Metro Manilans getting more and more fast-paced, network executives probably figured that many people are resorting to multi-tasking just to keep up with what has to be done. Radio already enabled people to be updated with the news while preparing for work in the morning or cooking dinner at night. Why not, TV executives must have thought, have television news programs that kept people company while they did other things?

This explains why three years ago, ABS-CBN put up “Alas Singko Y Media,” initially a two-hour early morning news and current affairs program that worked more like televised radio. It had traffic updates, call-ins, bits of news and information wedged in between talk. It was an instant hit, quickly eclipsing GMA’s early morning programs that had been around for years. Today, “Alas Singko” still has the same segment mix, but has been extended to three hours, the better to catch even the late-rising executive. It is what AC Nielsen analysts call passive TV viewing because it does not require the viewers’ undivided attention. “Now you could do your ironing and you could fix breakfast,” says Gabriel Buluran, AC Nielsen’s associate director for operations. “It’s telling you the news while letting you do all these other things.”

This also seems to be the thinking behind the early evening infotainment shows, although these are shorter and more visually interesting, perhaps to help viewers who manage to make it home that early to relax. By the time the late evening news programs are on, the viewers are too tired and too sleepy despite all the things still on their to-do list. And so while everything in the newscasts is kept short, extra effort is exerted to keep the viewers’ attention, even if it means having the anchors practically shout the headlines or pretend to argue over an issue.

In the past, the lives of broadcast news people were much simpler. As Buluran points out, they didn’t have that much to worry about since “people didn’t have much choice. After 12 midnight, there wasn’t anything to watch on TV.” But cable TV has changed all that, and network executives are now twitching nervously. So far, AC Nielsen’s study of audience share shows that more than 20 percent of TV-viewing households are tuned in to cable late in the evening, eating slowly into the ABS-CBN’s commanding 40-percent share.

The bright boys at the networks console themselves with the thought that the numbers could easily swing back, depending on what’s showing where. But they are sweating heavily nevertheless, given the aggressive marketing of cable companies, which offer low monthly subscriptions, deferred payments and even free TV sets. As it is, the estimated number of cable subscribers nationwide has reached 1.2 million, more than double the 1996 total. Industry insiders say a significant chunk of cable viewers may be made up of the CDE audience, which remains the target of much of the cable companies’ marketing strategies.

Despite all these, ABS-CBN is still number one among the networks when it comes to snaring advertising revenues. This year, it has taken more than a third of the P10 billion advertisers have paid the networks so far. Growth in television airtime revenues and other entertainment-related businesses gave ABS-CBN a 20-percent growth in earnings in the first half of 1999 alone. Its strong financial showing in fact powered its latest venture into the corporate arena. In early October, the Lopezes created ABS-CBN Holdings, the vehicle they used to offer Philippine Depository Receipts (PDRs) in the stock market for foreign investors who cannot buy into existing ABS-CBN stocks.

On the day it was listed, ABSH raised P6 billion, which has since been plowed back into the network for its expansion into—surprise, surprise—cable with its ABS-CBN Cable Network. Part of the funds have also been used to strengthen sister companies such as the movie outfit Star Cinema, and UHF Channel Studio 23. An ABS-CBN release quoted its chairman Eugenio Lopez III as saying that he expects ABS-CBN to “continue its dominance as it moves to becoming a total media company.”

But for ABS-CBN to continue to dominate, its shows must rate. Laggards cannot be tolerated, since these are perceived to hurt the company bottom line. According to Maderazo, keeping a show like “The World Tonight” was a “sacrifice” the company could no longer afford to make. He says the news program no longer “connected with the audience,” as proven by its diminished ratings and revenues.

THEN AGAIN, JUST who is this audience TV programs are supposed to connect with? The ratings, after all, are Manila-centric. The numbers are actually culled from a sample of 250 households representing the two million TV-viewing households in Metro Manila, which is the advertisers’—and therefore the networks’—priority area.

It is the tastes and preferences of this sample that dictate how networks program their television hours. Hence, when ABS-CBN decided to cancel “The World Tonight,” the network did not take into consideration the six million other viewing households outside Metro Manila. The news show’s former executive producer, Ging Reyes, also notes that most of those who protested or lamented the loss of the program were viewers from the provinces. She confirms, “They’re not reflected in the ratings.”

Network executives do not even try to hide that they are not interested in what viewers outside Metro Manila want. Says Maderazo: “Your revenues are not in the provinces. They are here in Metro Manila.”

In truth, the networks bring the provincial viewers in only when it suits them. When the networks sell advertising, one of their come-ons is that they are beamed nationwide. A 30-second commercial spot on a top-rating program on ABS-CBN, which reaches 98 percent of the Philippines, costs more than P100,000. GMA’s reach is almost equal that, but it loses out to ABS-CBN in terms of signal and clarity of reception in some areas.

In the wake of the fiasco that is “Pulso,” however, media watchers, network insiders and advertisers are all wondering who really constitutes the local TV audience. Many are mulling in particular over who does stay up watching television late at night. Asks Philippine Star columnist Alfredo Yuson asks: “Is there really a substantial audience that prefers its newscasts in Tagalog at that late hour?” Reyes, who remains at ABS-CBN, paraphrases the question: “At 11 pm, what are CDE audiences doing? They have to sleep because they have to wake up early the next day. They are not company CEOs who can wake up late and go to work in a chauffeur-driven car.”

There are many other questions that perplex network bosses, news executives and broadcast journalists. Among them: Why is there an audience for the documentary series “I-Witness” on GMA or “The Correspondents” and “Assignment” on ABS-CBN, despite their requiring viewers to sit through news features that last 10 minutes each at a minimum or discourses on issues that can go on for an hour. Granted, of late, these shows have gone through some considerable “softening” as well. But if there is an audience for such programs, why assume that late night news viewers have short attention spans by giving them minute-long newsbits on the likes of “Pulso” and “Frontpage”?

Certainly, the AC Nielsen survey, or any other ratings survey for that matter, will be hard pressed to come up with answers to these queries. For all the polling carried out and the charts and graphs crafted in efforts to come up with its profile, the television audience remains an intangible, invisible mass whose tastes and preferences are subjective and change constantly.

Writes Australia-based media and culture expert Ien Ang in her book Desperately Seeking the Audience: “‘Television audience’ is not a static, stone-like object whose characteristics can be described once and for all, but is a continually changing, dynamic object that always seems to elude definition. The fact that the production of ratings is an ongoing, never-ending practice testifies to this slipperiness: even the most factual, objective characteristics of ‘television audience,’ its size and its composition, cannot be assumed constant, and have to be established again and again, day after day. Ratings are very fleeting products: they become obsolete almost instantly.”

But without anything else to hold on to, the networks have no choice but to rely on the ratings. And for the past few years, those ratings have established that late night audiences have been increasing dramatically, probably because the demands of urban living have been making people reach home late and stay up even later.

Among the networks’ responses to this trend has been to stretch primetime hours of seven p.m. to 10 p.m. as far as they can. TV stations have pushed back the late evening newscasts into later timeslots to allow for extended entertainment programs. In an industry where punctuality is a cardinal rule, the networks have been on Filipino time as far as the late evening newscasts were concerned.

The bottom line is that news is no longer as important to network executives as it used to be. And if they could replace it with entertainment, they would.