Penblunt & Hogwash

Breaking News: Indian TV news is rotting

Sujit Chakraborty

This is a column being written under the totalitarian regime and command of Pinaki Bhattacharya, and had we not been friends for so long, I’d have approached Amnesty, for he is forcing me to write on a subject to which I am a novice: media journalism.

But then, as a TV watcher, I have been a veteran just as anyone of you out there.
There is one question that has been plaguing me ever since choice became available vide cable TV, when the moronic government channel could be switched off and something as exciting as BBC could be watched (I am an unabashed BBC fanatic).

So, you watch BBC, then you watch History Channel, and NatGeo, and sports, serials, sex, fashion, films… and you are having an unending infotainment orgasm when it suddenly all goes limp!

There comes Hindi news channels… the Indians are here… move over firangis… no more cultural imperialism.
God said, let there be Hindi news channels, and there was Aajtak… initially brilliant but slowly meandered to repetitiveness. But it made a killing in advertisement revenue, and got many rivals green with envy
So, there came other Hindi channels as well and the TRP war exploded.
And with competition came not quality but trash, reversal of global trends.
“Sansaneeeeee”, one news-feature programme went, and the presenter with a balding forehead and a pony tail, growled, grimaced and declared that he would reveal all and he growled and made nasty faces over stories that were so insignificant, one wondered what he was getting at, after all.
Sansanee, Hindi for sensationalism, gripped the Hindi news channels, the need to shock, the need to take away the context.

Imagine this:
The head, the owner so to say, of a Hindi news channel kept showing a severed leg lying in a street in Bombay, and uttering in moronic monotone: “This is a severed leg lying in Bombay, which our viewer so-and-so had sent a video clipping of. If any one can identify whose leg this is and whether the man is alive or dead….”
The channel called this… yes, you are right, Breaking News.

This was followed by another news item where the camera just hung on from below a building where a jobless young man was sitting on the terrace threatening to kill himself. The cameras hung on, waiting for the man to jump, and showed everything, all the way till the jobless, hapless man hit the ground and spilt his life out….
Breaking News, of course, though it was being shown on all the other channels as well and till the last time they showed the coverage, it was Breaking News!

Sorry, I am wrong, because towards the end of that night, ‘expert commentators’ for the channel reasoned that the suicidal man would not have died, after all, and at worst broken his leg – had he jumped in the right manner ‑ from a three-storied building…. But then, the idiot landed on his head, not legs, so he died!
I wonder why this is breaking news. I wonder why this cameraman was sitting idle. He is a journalist, so he had to cover, not protect and guide a life to safety, because then there would be no story.

But this is veering away from what I had wanted to write, which is that don’t our TV editors watch the foreign news channels? The entire concept of news coverage is different. For instance, Nisha Pillai is a news reader, as we understand this. But here we just have news readers. Salma Sultan of yore never got down to reporting. Nisha does. So do many others, and sometimes the more famous of BBC’s reporters actually read news.
And if there is a personality to be interviewed on TV on, say environmental issue, it will be Nisha, because she has covered the green beat, but if it is on fashion, it will not be Nisha, but someone who knows the fabrics and designs.

In Indian channels, interviewing somehow gives the interviewer a star status, so only some are allowed to do that, whether they know the subject or not… the haloed editors.
Tim Sebastian did interviews BBC, practically one a day. But his demeanour is different in each case, his attitude changes, and even the settings in the place where the shoot takes place changes.
Why can’t we do things like that?

We do not think, may be, or may be the answer is in something else? May be we have fossilised, or decided not to grow up… may be we have decided that we are so good that we need not change.
And do remember, it is not that we do not have technicians or investigators or designers here who are up to the mark; in fact, we export them, we are so full of them.
Look at the Indian advertisements. I do not know how much of this is copy from Western ideas. I doubt. We create some of the most superb ads…
So why are we so stupid on news, so crude and so unwanting to excel and reluctant? Why do we chase only sensationalism?
All of you have some answers, so do fill us in
I have some of the answers, but I am not breaking that news just now.
Here’s wishing you all the boredom!