MULTIMEDIA

Missing the Game

This piece is part of a series to mark the first anniversary of the shutdown of ABS-CBN’s broadcast on free TV and radio which happened May 5, 2020.

Video by Moki Magpantay

Moki Magpantay saw the ABS-CBN shutdown on May 5, 2020 from afar— more than 10,000 kilometers away and in a different time zone.

The executive producer for ABS-CBN Sports’ flagship program “The Score” and other shows, Moki went on leave in 2019 to take up Master of Sciences in Social and Public Communications at the London School of Economics.

She had already been living in the United Kingdom for 8 months when the network was taken off the air. From her end, it was not “the night of,” but “the day of” the shutdown.

Moki had looked forward to returning to sports journalism when she was to fly home in September 2020 after her year-long course, having also dealt with the double impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit.

But in July 2020, the Sports division was among businesses ABS-CBN dissolved following the congressional committee’s rejection of the network's franchise bid.

“[I] just [tried] to not think about it, because it [would] break me,” she recalls in this vlog interspersed with snippets of life in London and memories of better days at ABS-CBN Sports.

Moki is back in the Philippines and works in communications strategy.