Faculty of Arts and Letters mentor and ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC) anchor Asst. Prof. Christian Esguerra was named the 2020 Marshall McLuhan Fellow. He received the award on October 9, 2020, during the virtual Jaime V. Ongpin Journalism Seminar (JVOJS), an annual event organized by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR).
Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines Peter MacArthur noted that Esguerra was chosen as someone “whose passion for the craft transcends new platforms and whose proficient mastery to discover and explain the facts restricts the space for disinformation to thrive.”
As a McLuhan Fellow, Esguerra will deliver lectures across Canada and the Philippines in March, meet with media practitioners in Canada, and members of the Canadian government.
Named after the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, who was a towering figure in media studies most known for the phrase ‘The medium is the message,’ the award is given annually to a Filipino journalist who exhibited excellent work in the preceding year.
The McLuhan Fellowship comes a year after Esguerra, who teaches at the Communication and Media Studies Department of the Faculty of Arts and Letters and is a Research Fellow at the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities, was conferred the Titus Brandsma Award for Emergent Leadership in Journalism in 2019. He also received the Award of Distinction from CMFR last year. Esguerra was a reporter for the Philippine Daily Inquirer before he transferred to ABS-CBN. The editor in chief of the Varsitarian, the official student publication of the University of Santo Tomas, Esguerra graduated cum Laude from the UST Faculty of Arts and Letters in 2000.
Currently, Esguerra hosts “Matters of Fact,” a 30-minute political talk segment on ANC’s online newscast where he engages experts and policymakers in timely conversations. He also has a podcast titled “Facts First with Christian Esguerra,” available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The CMFR began partnering with the Canadian Embassy in the Philippines for the establishment of the McLuhan Fellowship in 1997. Previous recipients include co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism Sheila Coronel, Rappler Managing Editor and Thomasian Glenda Gloria, ABS-CBN broadcast journalist Jeff Canoy, GMA News reporter Joseph Morong, among many others.
