IT’S NOT AS if Tan were a welcome bovine in many a media company’s pastures, and in truth ABS-CBN and the Star are not the only ones to feel his presence. As some insiders tell it though, there simply was no stopping him when he came lumbering confidently through the corporate gates, often with a considerable number of company shares on his back. At least that’s how it was with ABS-CBN, which found Tan in possession of 20 million shares of the publicly listed Lopez-owned radio and television network. Tan had bought the shares in 1996 through his Allied Banking Corporation. Having them means Tan now owns three percent of the country’s largest broadcast company, bringing him close to a board seat beside mall magnate and fellow taipan Henry Sy.

The difference, says an ABS-CBN source, is that Sy was invited to join the ABS-CBN board while Tan was not. The SM owner has a cinema business thought beneficial to ABS-CBN’s movie production outfit Star Cinema. Tan, in contrast, had no deal to offer the Lopezes. Even worse, says the source, he was feared to tarnish the network’s good standing with his reputation as a tax evader.

The case of the Star, the third most widely circulated broadsheet in the country, is rather different. When its late publisher Betty Go-Belmonte was trying to get the paper off the ground in the 1980s, Tan is said to have generously lent her part of the cash she needed. “I owed him money,” Monsod recalls Belmonte telling her once, “but I paid him back.”

According to Monsod, Belmonte had also assured her of complete independence in writing her columns, “but when she died, things changed.” Monsod apparently finds some connection between the way she was treated and the fact that Star publisher Max Soliven also happens to be publisher and chairman of the board of Eastgate publishing, the group that produces PAL’s inflight magazine Mabuhay. That, harrumphs Monsod, is a clear case of conflict of interest.

Tan reportedly owns shares in the paper through a trustee. He is also believed to be part-owner of the Philippine Post, a new broadsheet said to have been funded by Finance Secretary and known Tan fan Edgardo Espiritu. But the newspaper that he has long been rumored to have more than a minority interest in is Today, the slick daily run by lawyer and television host Teddy Locsin Jr. Rumors regarding the alleged real owners of the paper began circulating as early as Today’s start-up stage, when a Tan-owned company was revealed to be its major supplier of state-of-the-art computers.

Such ownership talks have persisted to this day, although until recently they were confined in media circles. At the peak of the flak over PAL, however, the matter resurfaced in Today’s own op-ed section. “As far as I know,” labor leader Popoy Lagman, then supporting the PAL unions, wrote in a letter to the editor, “the P30 million he (Teddyboy) received from Tan was gratis. Hence, he has no obligation to become Tan’s slave.” Locsin countered with the charge that Lagman was secretly playing both sides and that Tan had given the former rebel P20 million and a car to persuade the PAL employees to end the strike. Interestingly enough, the sharp-tongued Locsin neglected to deny the insinuation that Tan’s money had helped start Today.

But perhaps only Lucio Tan himself knows for sure which media outfits he has money in. The personnel of one of the country’s top five AM radio stations say they had no inkling Tan had some business interest in their station until they began hitting the magnate during the PAL fiasco. Somehow, the station owners were reminded that Tan had bailed them out during a financial crisis in the 1980s, and that he was therefore a business partner—a very silent one, but a partner nonetheless. The result, says one station insider, is that management simply refused to air any Tan or PAL-related news in the week the controversy was raging.

Another radio station that can be called Tan-friendly is DWWW. The station was originally owned by the family of veteran newscaster Tina Monzon-Palma, but acquired by Bacsal a few years ago. Bacsal, who says he is “connected” with Fortune Tobacco but declines to be more specific, insists Tan has no interest in the venture.

To Lucio Tan’s close friends and associates, most of his investments in media, admitted or not, are mere manifestations of the taipan’s generosity. “Alam mo kasi nung araw, maraming taong nangangailangan ng pera, uutang sa kanya, pag hindi nabayaran, equity na lang (You know in the old days, a lot of people who needed money would approach Lucio Tan for loans. When they couldn’t pay him back, he just writes off the debts as equity)!” says retired Gen. Salvador Mison, president of Basic Holdings Corporation, which manages several Tan companies.

As his friends see it, it is hardly Tan’s fault that his being big-hearted has earned him an equally generous share of defenders in the media. Jake Macasaet, publisher of Ang Pahayagang Malaya, told a U.S. journalist during an interview three years ago, “I maintain that he (Lucio Tan) is a persecuted businessman.”

But Tan’s associates and friends may be downplaying the effects of his presence, financial and otherwise, in media outfits. Says a public relations practitioner who deals with newspaper reporters and editors: “I have to tread my way carefully through every paper other than BusinessWorld because Lucio Tan has a person protecting his interests in most every paper, except perhaps BusinessWorld.”

If the PR practitioner is correct, then that may explain why most newspapers had refused to air anti-Tan stories when the airline was in distress. Then again, it could also have been due to the fear of getting dragged off to court, a very costly risk to take for dailies, many of which were themselves not doing much better than PAL. The one paper that did run stories on Tan and PAL, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, ended up as the respondent in a P100-million libel suit filed by the billionaire himself last September. The paper had headlined a story saying Tan bled the airline dry and made P25 billion in the process. The case was dismissed by the Makati regional trial court on February 16.

Today columnist Dan Mariano, however, maintains that in general, “PAL has been getting sympathetic coverage from the press.” He points out that the airline actually maintained friendly ties with the media long before Tan came into the picture. For years, PAL made it a practice to regularly give free tickets to print reporters, editors and publishers and broadcast personalities. Newspapers also rely on PAL to bring their copies to the provinces. Concludes Mariano: “No wonder then that whenever PAL employees go on strike, many news organizations are inclined to portray them as villains.”

Unfortunately for Tan, the good press didn’t seem to do him much good. A survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) last year found Lucio Tan to be infamous—four out of five adult Filipinos know him, but he is more distrusted than trusted by the public. Wrote SWS director Mahar Mangahas: “From this it would seem that the media persons recently named by labor leader Filemon ‘Popoy’ Lagman as being on Lucio Tan’s payroll have been ineffective—though another possibility is that those in the so-called envelopmental media have at least kept Mr. Tan’s trust rating from getting even worse.”