GOOD LOOKS, an old-rich name and connections ensured Legarda’s easy entry into television when she co-hosted the variety show “Discorama” and appeared on TV commercials during her teens. When she entered the University of the Philippines in 1977, Legarda quickly became a dazzling campus presence. No one at the state university doubted that she would make a name for herself somehow, someday.

That’s also because she never kept her ambitions secret. Classmates recall that at the start of each semester, she would announce to her teachers that she was running for honors, some sort of advance notice that she was out to get high grades.

“She approached me to find out if she could do extra work to boost her grades,” remembers Sicam, who was also her teacher in broadcast writing at the UP Institute (now College) of Mass Communication. But Sicam turned her down because, he says, that would have been unfair to her classmates.

Legarda managed to graduate cum laude in 1981, despite submitting a thesis—a content analysis of Vicente Manansala’s paintings—better suited for the College of Fine Arts rather than the Institute of Mass Communication. Years later, Legarda would boast of her UP honors and did nothing to stop overeager emcees who announced during the 1998 campaign sorties that she had topped her class and graduated summa cum laude. The truth is that several other students had beaten Loren to the top.

Throughout her life, Legarda tried her damnedest best to get there. Her second marriage to politician and wealthy businessman Antonio Leviste gave her a partner who was used to the wheeling-dealing worlds of business and politics. Leviste is very much the man behind Legarda, financing her political career and deftly plotting her political maneuvers.

Legarda’s own persistence, however, should not be underestimated. At the National Defense College of the Philippines (NDCP), where she obtained her masters degree in national security administration, she was determined to top the class, no matter what it took. “She came to me twice questioning why her grade is like this and like that,” says retired Navy Captain Marciano Agustin, course director at the NDCP, who swears he always stood by the grades he gave her, which were not the highest.

But her classmates complained that the NDCP was playing favorites with Legarda, who was already a big TV name when she enrolled at the college in 1992. For instance, she was only 32 years old at the time, clearly three years short of the minimum age of 35 that the NDCP requires its graduate students to have. According to Legarda, then Defense Secretary Renato de Villa agreed to bend the rules because “I topped the entrance exam.”

Agustin recalls that because of her hectic schedule, and the fact that she was pregnant at that time, Legarda failed to meet some graduation requirements, including study trips here and abroad. Yet unlike other equally busy classmates who accepted their limitations, Legarda pushed her teachers to allow her to make up for her deficiencies. To this day, Loren tells everyone that she graduated valedictorian from the NDCP.

“I don’t know kung saan nakuha ni Loren yung valedictorian niya,” wonders Agustin. The elite NDCP does not give out citations for valedictorian and salutatorian. What the College does give out, says Agustin, are medals for academic excellence, which Legarda and some others got. She also received an award for best thesis.

Legarda’s problem, say both a former schoolmate and an ex-Channel 2 colleague, is that she is too loose with labels. On top of that, they say, she is not too eager to share credit with others.

It was an open secret among the “Inside Story” staff that the show’s researchers did much of the data gathering for her NDCP thesis. Such help is not uncommon for NDCP graduate students—among them officials from local governments, Congress and the bureaucracy—who also get the privilege of hiring research staff. But an “Inside Story” scriptwriter reportedly wrote the script for the audio-visual presentation that she submitted as part of her thesis, which dealt on national security and the media.

PEP Talk (The Book), a collection of scripts from her TV show, also made it look like it was authored by Legarda. The truth, say former “PEP Talk” staffers, was that she did not write any script in the book nor even the short introductions to each script. She did include the writers in her acknowledgment, but did not identify them as authors.

“She loves being identified as the best this, top that,” says someone who knows her well. One of her more recent, and more hilarious, claims though actually came from her PR people, who labeled her Princess Diana reincarnate because of the adulation (and the flowers) she got from the public during the campaign period.

To her credit, Legarda has received over 30 awards for her programs. That is why the phrase “multi-awarded broadcast journalist” is always tacked on to her name. But these accoladesshould be shared by the hardworking crews who put out these programs.

The fact is that on “The World Tonight,” Legarda was just someone who gave a face to TV news and hardly did any writing herself. Anchors like Legarda are the last in the assembly line that churns out TV news. The term “anchor” is derived from the sports term that means the last runner in a relay race. In TV news, reporters, writers, and producers do most of the work.

Legarda did take active part in the production and conceptualization of “PEP Talk” and “The Inside Story” in their earlier days, when she was both host and executive producer. But that didn’t last long, and she became just a host who showed up, coiffed and dressed, usually when everything was all set for an interview, or a few seconds’ standupper wherever the crew was filming a story. An exception was Muslim Mindanao, one of Legarda’s favorite destinations, and where she would spend more time. But most of the time, it was not for her to get down and dirty, which is not how television wants its stars anyway. In this sense, TV is not much different from the movies.

ABS-CBN and Legarda herself have always promoted “The Inside Story” as “a program that can rate, sell, win awards, survive, and bring back credibility to the television industry.”

Complaints about the show, however, often questioned its very credibility and sense of responsibility. In 1992, the Philippine Women’s University lambasted “The Inside Story” for showing pictures of its students in a special report on prostitution, thereby implying—intended or not—that the PWU students were mixed up in the sex trade. Critics also noted that in a 1997 episode, Legarda’s voice had been spliced over that of the real interviewer (a social worker) of the 11-year-old victim of convicted rapist, Rep. Romeo Jalosjos. Another episode had women’s groups in shock as Legarda proclaimed that Maria Theresa Carlson led a happy married life with Ilocos Norte Governor Rodolfo Fariñas—a few weeks after Carlson escaped his beatings.

And contrary to Legarda’s image as a hard-hitting broadcast journalist, she had her own sacred cows. Former “Inside Story” scriptwriters say Legarda would blow her top when they wrote negative things about her personal friends in government or social circles.

The bottomline is that Legarda is a true-blue child of television as myth-maker and image-builder. Therein lies the medium’s danger: People see and believe only what TV allows them to, which may not be the whole truth.