Pasiplat sa istorya
Sentina, H. X. B. (2019). Pasiplat sa Istorya: A Good View of the Political Economy of Buenavista Cable TV, Inc. (Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis). College of Mass Communication, University of the Philipines Diliman, Quezon City.
ABSTRACT
This research is about Buenavista Cable TV, Inc.—a local cable TV provider in San Jose, Antique which is a for-profit company. This thesis studies the company’s local community channel which broadcasts Balitalakayan—a news program that reports about the province—and its production processes. This paper also studies the company’s broadcast decisions and inclinations through a political economy lens.
This study uses the interview, immersion (product analysis and situation analysis), and archival research to collect its data. The interviewees were two stockholders of the company and the lone production head of Balitalakayan. Archival research made use of company documents made available to the researcher, and the one-day immersion studied the output of Balitalakayan in the environment it is being produced in.
The researcher used Karl Marx’s political economy, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model and its five filters, and Vincent Mosco’s three processes of applying political economy to communication (commodification, structuration, spatialization) to form the theoretical framework of this thesis.
The results of the study led to the conclusion that Buenavista Cable TV, Inc. as a for-profit company has good intentions which are inevitably contradicted by its for-profit orientation. Buenavista Cable TV, Inc. operates paradoxically—its goal and its function is to bring important messages and news to Antiqueños—but this is only for those who can pay for airtime and those who can pay for cable TV subscription—while inadvertently denying the financially incapable of their opportunities to broadcast and/or their opportunities to access important local media.
Keywords: political economy, propaganda model, commodification, structuration, spatialization