The Poverty of Television: The Media of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines by Jonathan Corpus Ong

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Poverty of Television: The Media of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines by Jonathan Corpus Ong Patrick F. Campos JONATHAN CORPUS ONG The Poverty of Television: The Media of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines London: Anthem Press, 2015. 215 pages. Why only now? As with studies that seek to fill in the gaps of existing literature on a certain subject matter, the book necessarily comes late. But reading through the work, one senses the consequences of being able to only belatedly think about Jonathan Corpus Ong’s subject matter—the “poverty of television.” After all, he is not simply writing about television, but [End Page 320] flesh-and-blood people with histories and everyday lives imbricated in the everyday mediation of suffering, a dynamic of mediation that has itself been entrenched in a long history of class division. The suffering of the poor has long been “spectacularly displayed” and “over-represented” in Philippine media (2), and yet Ong’s ethnographic work on television may be considered a first. The Poverty of Television: The Media of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines is based on the dissertation of Ong, a media sociologist who obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge and currently lectures in Media and Communication at Leicester University. Ecstasy and locality are two spatial concepts one can use to appreciate Ong’s simultaneous contributions to different fields. Jean Baudrillard posits the paradoxical imperative of ex-stasis in communication, where one has to stand outside of oneself to be able to communicate. Baudrillard asserts this point in the context of the “obscenity” of contemporary media, which no longer keep secrets, including the suffering of many. Ong contributes along this now mainline thought, but he does so counterintuitively and, hence, productively, by situating himself and his subjects in multiple spaces outside. In chapter 1, “The Moral Turn: From First Principles to Lay Moralities,” Ong surveys the literature on media ethics and suffering and finds that the text-centered and philosophically normative works that dominate the field are themselves not sufficiently hospitable for understanding the mediation of suffering on Philippine television. Ong argues that it is necessary to step back to consider the other dimensions of the subject. First, he asserts, the question cannot be about media ethics in general, but about the ethics of everyday media practices. Second, it cannot be media ethics based on the text and the producer alone, but ethics based on the consumption and reception of media audiences. And third, it cannot be about responding to “distant suffering,” as mapped out by Western scholarship, but coming to terms with the nearness of suffering, the immediacy of mediacy. As a response to these limitations, Ong clears a new situation from which to ask the fundamental question of his whole project: “How do audiences in their different contexts respond to televised suffering” (169)? He proposes in chapter 2, “Theorizing Mediated Suffering: Ethics of Media Texts, Audiences and Ecologies,” that the inquiry should begin in the gaps within three separate debates, the debates on textual ethics, audience ethics, and reception ethics. Ong puts these three debates in dialogue with each other by considering them from the viewpoint of a peculiar media culture, Philippine television. [End Page 321] The peculiarity is put in relief because the canonic literature cannot fully account for the Philippine situation. What kind of ecstasy is enacted in this specific media locality? And through Ong’s careful nuancing of local media, one is able to hover outside the media landscape and notice its peculiarities from some distance, such as its prevailing business model that represents the underclass in order to profit from the same underclass and, ironically, its institutionalization of charity that seeks to directly intervene in the suffering of the underclass where the state fails to do so. Herein lie the undeniable contributions of Ong—to underline the consequences of Western scholarship on actual suffering subjects that are homogenized and rendered absent and to afford a concrete presence for the Philippine subject in television studies. The latter is crucial, for there are no television studies to speak of with clear shape, history, and direction in the Philippines. Ong’s study, thus, sets the agenda...