Korina Sanchez: From Newsroom Beginnings to Radio, TV News, and Rated Korina

A career shaped by public-service broadcasting, enduring partnerships, family, and changing media platforms.

Korina Sanchez is a Filipino broadcast journalist, radio commentator, television presenter, and producer. Over more than four decades, she has moved between daily newscasts, public-service radio, interview programs, and stories about ordinary people. Viewers may know her from TV Patrol or Rated K; radio listeners may remember her long partnership with Ted Failon on DZMM.

Those different roles are essential to understanding her career. On a newscast, she delivers the day’s events. In talk radio, she questions, argues, and comments. In a magazine program, she follows a person’s story beyond a headline. Her public identity has developed through all three forms of broadcasting.

Born in Hong Kong on October 5, 1964, Sanchez grew up in a family headed by Ramon and Celia Sanchez. She studied communication arts at Maryknoll College, now Miriam College, before building the career that would make her first name a familiar television brand.

Her parents were business owners who worked long hours. Looking back in a 2019 interview, she said that their frequent absence from home had encouraged her to become independent and learn to get along with different people. Both parents died in 2004, after seeing her become successful in television but before her marriage and motherhood.

Her first newsroom experience was considerably less glamorous than the career that followed. As an undergraduate at MBS Channel 4, she recalled making coffee for established broadcasters such as Mel Tiangco and cutting carbon paper. She described walking in to apply without a backer, motivated by the excitement of being inside a newsroom.

She also trained through a program associated with veteran broadcasters Eddie Ilarde and Bobby Ledesma. In her account, that experience confirmed her interest in broadcasting. She eventually graduated and found herself working on television, surprising parents who remembered her as someone who scarcely spoke at the dinner table.

Her early assignments included weather presenting. She joined ABS-CBN in 1986, beginning a long association with the network as it rebuilt its broadcasting operations. Among her subsequent television assignments was The World Tonight, while her career increasingly extended into reporting, anchoring, and hosting.

Radio became a major part of that development. In August 1991, Sanchez and Ted Failon became the original hosts of DZMM’s Aksyon Ngayon, a program devoted to public service. It connected people seeking help with government offices and other sources of assistance, making listeners’ problems part of the broadcast itself.

The partnership continued through Hoy Gising! on television and Tambalang Failon at Sanchez on radio. Their work combined complaints, questions for public officials, commentary, and humor. For someone unfamiliar with Philippine talk radio, the tandem illustrates how a morning program can move between the day’s news and a direct conversation about what authorities should do.

Failon became one of the defining professional relationships of her career. In a 2008 interview about their television program Harapan, Sanchez described the familiarity of colleagues who could finish each other’s sentences. Failon spoke about the difficulty of keeping a partnership together over many years. Their shared work had developed into an enduring professional friendship.

Sanchez also established a recognizable television identity of her own. Balitang K, which ran from 1996 to 2001, placed her name at the center of a news-and-features format. She later co-hosted Morning Girls with Kris and Korina with Kris Aquino in 2003–2004, showing a more conversational side alongside her news work.

Her major anchor assignments included TV Patrol from 2001 to 2004 and the late-night newscast Bandila, launched in 2006 with Julius Babao and Karen Davila. In 2010, she returned to TV Patrol alongside Noli de Castro and Ted Failon. These were different broadcasting settings, but each kept her closely associated with national television news.

De Castro and Failon were more than names beside hers at the anchor desk. Discussing the 2010 return, she described the two men as being like family and said they worked on a similar wavelength. That familiarity followed years spent in overlapping radio and television assignments.

In 2004, she began Rated K, the weekly magazine program that became one of her longest-running projects. Its subjects ranged from public figures and celebrities to people whose unusual experiences, hardships, or achievements might otherwise receive little attention.

The format allowed her to spend time with a story: visiting a community, speaking with a family, exploring a livelihood, or following an individual through a difficult experience. ABS-CBN’s 2019 anniversary account described a mixture of personality interviews, human-interest features, and assistance for people in need.

One of the program’s best-known initiatives was the Handog Tsinelas campaign, which distributed slippers to children. It became a recurring link between the magazine show and practical assistance. The campaign also made her public-service identity visible outside the studio, through visits and distributions in different communities.

Her solo radio work included Korina sa Umaga and, later, a DZMM program called Rated Korina. The latter ran from 2012 to early 2014—years before the same title became familiar as her television show. This is an important distinction in a career where program names have crossed between radio and television.

In 2014, she stepped away from the radio program to attend to requirements for a master’s degree in journalism at Ateneo de Manila University. She completed the degree in 2016, returning to formal study after already spending decades in the profession.

Her private life also brought changes to her work. On October 27, 2009, she married politician Mar Roxas at Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City. In a later interview, she defended her return to news anchoring after taking leave during his 2010 vice-presidential campaign, saying the leave had been a matter of propriety.

The marriage placed her professional life close to electoral politics, and her account of that period acknowledges the difficulty of combining the roles of broadcaster and political spouse. Her eventual departure from regular TV Patrol duties came in the mid-2010s; Rated K continued as a separate part of her television career.

In February 2019, Sanchez and Roxas became parents to twins Pepe and Pilar, born through surrogacy in the United States. Motherhood arrived after a long period in which work, travel, and support for her extended family had occupied much of her life. She spoke publicly about learning infant care and preparing for the responsibility of raising children.

Her career has also included public disputes. In 2013, comments she made on radio criticizing CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper’s coverage of the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yolanda drew a response from Cooper and criticism online. The episode became a prominent example of how her commentary could make her a news subject herself.

A broader change came in 2020, when ABS-CBN’s loss of its broadcast franchise disrupted programs and employment across the network. Sanchez signed with Brightlight Productions, and her magazine show returned to free television on TV5 on October 24 as Rated Korina. She described the move as bittersweet while expressing a desire to continue working and serving an audience.

The transition carried the central magazine format into another production arrangement. It also showed that her television identity could travel with her: viewers could continue following the presenter and the kinds of stories associated with her, even as the program’s title and broadcast home changed.

Recognition continued during this period. In 2021, she received the PMPC Star Awards for Television’s Excellence in Broadcasting Lifetime Achievement Award. Her wider record includes radio and television honors and two Thomas Jefferson study grants for investigative journalism, according to her Tatler Asia profile.

In July 2023, she signed a co-production agreement with ABS-CBN for Rated Korina. The arrangement brought her magazine work back into a formal partnership with the company while the program continued reaching viewers across several channels and online platforms. At the signing, she emphasized the continuing supply of meaningful stories in ordinary people’s lives.

The later phase of her career has included a return to daily news. In 2024, she became an anchor of Bilyonaryo News Channel’s Agenda. The program brought her back into a regular newscast setting; by October 2026, BNC’s official listings identified her alongside Pinky Webb, Willard Cheng, and Erika Kristensen-Lee.

She also took over TV5’s Face to Face: Harapan, which began its run with her as host in November 2024. The program brought opposing parties together to discuss personal conflicts and seek a resolution. It drew on an aspect of her work already familiar from public-service broadcasting: asking questions while dealing directly with people and their grievances.

Her magazine and interview work drew renewed scrutiny in 2025 over features involving contractors Sarah and Curlee Discaya. Pasig Mayor Vico Sotto questioned alleged paid interviews. Her producers denied a ₱10-million interview placement and defended their choice of subjects. Philstar also reported that an earlier, subsequently deleted statement acknowledged payments for some features, including businesses such as the Discayas’, as advertising handled by the network. The dispute raised questions about the boundary between personal profiles, promotion, and journalism.

As of October 2026, her work spans several formats. She appears on BNC’s Agenda and hosts the morning discussion program Memo with Korina Sanchez-Roxas. On TV5, Rated Korina is listed on Sundays, while the daytime program now carries the title Face to Face with Ate Koring. Her current career therefore combines news, commentary, magazine storytelling, and daytime hosting.

For someone encountering her for the first time, Korina Sanchez’s story is one of a broadcaster who has repeatedly changed assignments while retaining a recognizable public identity. The young newsroom applicant became a reporter, a radio partner, a news anchor, a magazine host, a producer, and a mother. The roles have changed over time, but presenting stories and talking to people have remained at the center of her working life.