E- Nasaan Na? A Study on the Political Economic and Hegemonic Conditions Behind the Rise and Decline of ABS-CBN Foundation E-Media’s ETV Programs
E- Nasaan Na? A Study on the Political Economic and Hegemonic Conditions Behind the Rise and Decline of ABS-CBN Foundation E-Media’s ETV Programs
ABSTRACT
In 1994, the ABS-CBN Foundation, through its E-Media unit, pioneered the production and exhibition of educational television programs patterned after the school curriculum under its ETV (educational television) project. The latter part of the 2000’s saw the decline of these ETV programs and in 2012, the E-Media unit was dissolved and the last of its programs ended.
With the conditions given, this study traced the political-economic and hegemonic conditions behind the rise and decline of ETV programs produced by ABS-CBN Foundation’s E-Media and aired in ABS-CBN Channel 2. This study is guided by Vincent Mosco’s Political Economy of Communication and Antonio Gramsci’s Hegemony, and utilizes the Grounded Theory method in analyzing data.
The researcher found that the creation of the Foundation itself, and subsequently the production of ETV programs, was a product of spatialization because the Foundation was established as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ABS-CBN. ETV programs were fully funded by ABS-CBN in the beginning but this support was pulled out causing the programs to suffer massively from commodification. E-Media had to search for sponsors/advertisers and prove that they were worth the airtime they were donated. In terms of structuration, E-Media’s programs benefited from its connections with ABS-CBN and the Lopez family. This connection would later contribute greatly to problems and eventual demise of ETV programs due to the nature of ABS-CBN as a business enterprise and as the priorities of Gina Lopez, the Foundation’s General Manager and Chair of its Board of Trustees, would change over time. E-Media’s ETV programs could have been firestarters that could change children’s programming in the country because of the potential hegemonic powers of the Lopez family and of ABS- CBN. However, this potential was overpowered by the prevailing commercialised media in the country.
As this is an initial study, it is recommended that future researchers gather more data and try to see how ETV can be used now that the country is using the K-12 system which has a media component.
Keywords: political economy, hegemony, children’s television, educational television,E-Media, ABS-CBN, ETV
Endriga, D.M.J. (2015). E-Nasaan Na? A study on the political economic and hegemonic conditions behind the rise and decline of ABS-CBN Foundation E-Media’s ETV Programs. Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines, College of Mass Communication.