Media powerhouse NET25 is mourning the passing of Rowena “Weng” Dela Fuente-Deimoy, the reporter, anchor and columnist who rose from the newsroom to become the first woman President of Eagle Broadcasting Corporation. News of her recent passing was announced by the network and her family.
For more than three decades, her voice reached Filipino households over the airwaves, on television and, in her last years, on the NET25.com portal, where she wrote in the language of the ordinary reader.
Her career began in 1991 as a news writer at DZEM, the Christian Broadcasting Service, where she went on to report from the field, anchor the DZEM Weekend News and serve as acting news director.
In 1994, she joined DZEC 1062, the AM station of Eagle Broadcasting Corporation, as a field reporter. She later anchored Guest Who’s Talking and 1062 Eagle Patrol.
Her beat was the presidential palace. As a member of the Malacañang Press Corps from 1991, she covered six presidents, from Corazon Aquino’s last two years in office to Rodrigo Duterte’s first months, with the Senate and Defense beats in between. She once described the chance to cover them as a privilege.
From 2004, she hosted programs on NET25 and became one of the original anchors of Mata ng Agila, the network’s flagship newscast, which she presented on the main edition from 2011 to 2017 and on the weekend edition in 2025 and 2026.
She hosted Liwanagin Natin with Ka Totoy Talastas, Homepage, NET25 Weekend Report and Liwanagin Natin Reports as well, while serving as the network’s news-gathering head and senior correspondent.
Promoted to station manager of NET25, she was named President of Eagle Broadcasting Corporation in early 2018, the first woman to lead the company and in the very year it marked its fiftieth anniversary.
She described the post as a duty to serve the employees, likening the head of a company to the patriarch or matriarch of a nation, and pledged that EBC would keep to values-oriented, family-centered programming. In 2021, she received the Rotary Club of Manila’s Pro Patria Journalism Award on the network’s behalf.
In 2026 she wrote the Filipino-language column “Datos Online” in the Voices & Columns section of the NET25.com portal, taking on systems loss charges, the social media ban, violence in schools and the impeachment trial.
Her last column, “Strategy o pag-amin ng kahinaan?”, posted on October 14, 2026, argued that a fair process must withstand the scrutiny of the accused and the accusers alike.
NET25 has made a conscious effort to keep its opinion pages open to Filipino, and she was among the columnists who proved that a serious argument loses nothing when it is written in the language of the Filipino household. That is the standard she leaves to the newsroom she once led.
The “alternative mainstream” network extends its condolences to her family and to the colleagues who worked alongside her at DZEM, DZEC and NET25. Weng’s columns remain free to read on the NET25.com portal.
