From Flood Control to the Missing Bride

IN THE final weeks of 2025, the news cycle was dominated by a single story: a missing bride from Quezon City, eventually “found” in Pangasinan just days before the New Year.

For days, it was everywhere: updates, theories, reenactments, commentaries that felt less like journalism and more like national chismis.

In the process, far weightier national developments, like the resignation of Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) Commissioner Rossana Fajardo, barely registered.

Honestly, I don’t fully understand why this case escaped the fate of so many other missing-person stories. The Philippines has countless unresolved disappearances across the country, many of them far more urgent, far less covered.

Yet this one carried an emotional gravity that pulled people in and kept them there. Maybe it was the romance-turned-mystery. Maybe it was the thrill of a true-crime narrative close to home. Maybe it was the comfort of a story that Filipinos can talk about without having political consequences.

Attention is not just a personal choice; it is also a product being sold. Algorithms reward drama. I don’t want to lazily assume that this is a national “cover-up.”

But zoom out, and 2025 was hardly short on events that demanded sustained attention. We saw attempts to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte. We watched the drama surrounding former President Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest and the continuing ICC proceedings.

We saw the ban of POGOs in the Philippines. We dealt with tariff issues with the United States. We endured repeated West Philippine Sea confrontations between the Philippine Coast Guard and Chinese vessels. And, perhaps most painfully for ordinary Filipinos, we were forced to confront the flood-control mess: projects, budgets, and the lingering question of where the money went.

So why did the national spotlight pivot so abruptly in December, from hearings about flood control to wall-to-wall coverage of a single missing bride?

It is tempting to shrug and say Filipinos have a short attention span. But that’s too easy, and it’s not entirely fair.

Attention is not just a personal choice; it is also a product being sold. Algorithms reward drama. I don’t want to lazily assume that this is a national “cover-up.”

That accusation is too convenient. But I do want to ask a harder, cleaner question: Why do we keep rewarding spectacle while accountability struggles for airtime?

Why do we obsess over stories that barely change our lives, while the theft of public funds and the failures of public works are treated as background noise?

There is a plethora of issues that deserve the public’s focus. I’m sorry, but I cannot bring myself to care more about a viral mystery than about the billions potentially stolen money that could have built safer roads, proper drainage systems, and functioning services.

We cannot keep treating governance like a side plot.

Several executive officials promised that the so-called ‘Big Fish’ would be jailed this holiday season.

Names were floated and expectations were raised.

But I can already imagine the familiar choreography: backdoor calls, manufactured alibis, the slow dilution of public anger until the next story arrives.

If 2026 is to mean anything, it should begin with a simple resolve: don’t let the news feed decide what deserves our outrage.

Keep the spotlight where it belongs: on power, on money, on accountability.

Not on noise.