Journal

The Benevolent Dictator: Lessons from Political Campaigning in the Pre-Social Media Era

June 5, 2024

“You should get this man.” That’s what Boo Chanco — then vice president of the news division at ABS-CBN — said to Sergio “Serge” Osmeña III sometime in the 1990s, while pointing directly at me. I still don’t know if Boo was serious or just enjoying himself at my expense. But Serge took him at his word. That offhand introduction turned into one of the defining professional relationships of my career, one that would take me from the newsroom into the war rooms of some of the most consequential campaigns in modern Philippine political history — including the campaign that put Noynoy Aquino in Malacañang in 2010. Understand who Serge Osmeña III was before you understand what he taught me. Born December 13, 1943, he

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The ABS-CBN Shutdown, 4 Years Later: An Insider’s Honest Reckoning

May 8, 2024

It is now, four years after it happened, that I’ve finally made peace with what it means for one of the largest networks in the country to lose its franchise. ABS-CBN has, and continues to have, a place very dear to my heart. And I can’t say I was totally blindsided by the events of May 5, 2020. Unknown to most, the seeds were sown long before Mayor Digong ever thought about running for President — and I watched it happen from inside two worlds that were about to collide. How the ABS-CBN Franchise Fight Actually Started Here’s something most retrospectives on the ABS-CBN shutdown get wrong: this didn’t start with Duterte. The renewal process actually began under President Noynoy Aquino, all the way back

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A Target Board Over My Back

March 22, 2024

Part four of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada After 2016, most of the people I worked with went into government. I did not. I went back to building a business — advertising and reputation management — on the strength of the goodwill the campaign had generated. What I underestimated was how those networks would keep growing without anyone directing them,

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