Felt Relevance and Unequal Trust: Exploring Emotional Proximities to Journalism during the POGO Scandal in the Philippines

This article examines how publics interpret journalism during political scandal by focusing on the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) controversy as a site of emotional proximity, symbolic exclusion, and uneven trust. Moving beyond performance-based models, we conceptualize trust as an affective and relational judgment shaped by lived experience, narrative tone, and what we call felt relevance—the degree to which journalism resonates with everyday concerns and moral expectations. Drawing from the emotional turn in journalism studies and situated within broader debates on Chinese capital and Duterte-era legitimation strategies, the study explores how publics evaluate journalism not only through facts, but through how it feels—whether it recognizes, includes, or misrepresents. We present preliminary reflections from three pilot interviews in Pasay City, featuring a former POGO worker, a university student, and a long-term resident. Their narratives reveal how proximity to scandal generates ambivalence, how media coverage is often seen as episodic and extractive, and how trust is tied to emotional legibility as much as to factual accuracy. These early insights guide our ongoing comparative study and call for a deeper understanding of trust as a situated, emotionally mediated response to how journalism performs recognition in contexts of crisis.