Just when we are too engrossed with Hayden, Ruffa, Korina, A(H1N1) and charter change, an even more a pernicious virus keeps creeping in and we choose to ignore it.

Just when we are not looking, television delivers messages to our homes, so subtle yet potent and threatening to demolish every virtue we tried hard to instill in our children.

We wonder what our kids will become as a result of all the conflicting messages peddled by TV. Parents are helpless in convincing kids to eat healthy because a more forceful, more interesting authority, (i.e. media) is bewitching them to do otherwise. And no one, not even the education or health departments are giving a hoot.

We ask. Why is television overtaken by ads selling unfavorable diets of What’s wrong with fries, hotdogs, burgers, sugary cookies, ice cream, candies and others? Why is there hardly any ad promoting the virtues of healthy eating? The only thing that comes to mind is the yogurt ad that obliquely directs its message to adults by pushing its wellness site. The long running “Makulay ang buhay sa sinabawang gulay campaign is missed, its lilting tune and engaging dance number running in our minds to this day, never mind that it promoted chemically-processed powder, not the real, fresh thing.

Now comes a foreign powder orange drink that carelessly derides water, which doctors, mothers, scientists and teachers insist is the purest, healthiest drink.

In the ad’s opening scene, kids berate their playmates with: “Tubig lang?” (Just plain water?) With the millions of pesos set aside by the multinational for its ad campaign on TV, it will not surprise us if kids avidly watching all the programs it sponsors will eventually develop a dislike for water and demand unhealthy colored drinks instead.

A biscuit brand features a guy who hugs and helps everyone he bumps into but at the end of the ad, the same guy squanders all his merits by irresponsibly throwing the empty biscuit wrapper.

All this needless fuss by adults over the ad that allegedly teaches kids that words like “instant” and “express” are spelled LBC is simply that: needless. The whining only underscores their collective lack of faith in our schooling system and in their sorry regard for our children. Kids in school are smarter than to fall for that. They know that CAT is not spelled as d-o-g. I did not hear them raise a howl when the “I love New York” campaign foisted upon their generation a totally artistic, albeit erroneous spelling of the phrase. Instead, they took to the streets proudly wearing shirts emblazoned with “I heart NY.”

Or for a more contemporary example, why have these whiners not asked Manny Pacquiao to come to the defense of his mother when media goes to town with their spoofing and sometimes merciless buffoonery directed at the poor woman’s traits and speech? If the modern day hero and media icon allows the country to humiliate his mother, what message does it send to media users, many of them children?

Television today is peppered with so many instances of malevolence. Sometimes our watchdogs bark at the wrong trees.