Penblunt & Hogwash

Codes of Discontent

Penblunt

It’s a season in full bloom for the broadcasting industry, what with the Broadcast Bill in the offing and a media summit by Indian Television Dot Com, along with an associated Awards for the New Television channels organised by the dotcom paper, just over last weekend.

It is a season, if I may say so, of biting acrimony, and that too, at two levels: between the media and the government (a la Broadcasting Bill and the Code of Conduct); and an internecine war within the confines of the industry itself….

And this gives me an opening edgewise, because I have been dwelling on the ills of the “grab-‘em-by-the-short-‘n-curly” approach to TRP ratings as the sole route to moneymaking, as is the scene now in the (TV) news space.

The media was up for splits last weekend at the NT Awards, or the first ever attempt to criteriarise (I insist upon coining the term) was made by the dotcom mandarin of broadcasting in the country.

It was also in splits, as Dibang, NDTV, and Rajdeep Sardesai, CNN-IBN, shed garbs in the open, the former stubbornly and stridently, and the latter under the garb of a purdah.

The issue was jadoo-tona-bhavishyavanee-ultababa-katee-taang kiskaa hain, versus a more sterilised approach of what the news said in real times.

There emerged a unique suggestion from the Summit of Indiantelevision.com.

It said (moved first by Mr Naqvi of Aajtak) that there should be a segregation between News and Reality TV, and that each should compete for free-market revenue (read advertisement revenue) on its own category.

I am all for Naqvi…, at 49 and 25 years into the servitude of a scribe, and having savoured with disgust the stale wine of so-called news and rotten meat of sting operations, there seems to be a dire need to define news.

When I was in the Patriot, the late lamented left-oriented newspaper, it had a slogan pasted on the office walls (real walls, not false ceilings, as is the case now with news channels, literally and figuratively), which said the following:

News is everything that someone somewhere wants to hide…. Everything else is advertising!

Today, news, as defined in an unregulated and uncivilised, TRP seeking media, is so crass that it borders on illegal entertainment, and I am distressed why the Bar Girls of Mumbai got such raw deal after all.

The point is, that the industry has no common voice.

They touted this issue of segregating news and reality TV and then both, as the latest seminar hosted by the Federation of Indian Industry and Commerce, sat on opposite sides of the fence.

The only exception was Mr Naqvi, who just reiterated the position that he had unveiled at the dotcom summit.

This is the point.

The broadcasters have been having a free-for-all in terms of content providing.

Most of them have been within limits if public decency, if I may posit myself as a member of the public with go-able knowledge of laws regarding decency, propriety, national security and such other basic issues.

Yet, I myself perceive a problem with the basic TRP-guided market and especially the nakedness – not the nudity – of the Hindi broadcasting media, which it seems would look at you askance if you wore clothes otherwise.

Nevertheless, as a person who assumes to be a commentator and presumes he would be accepted as such, let me say (and I can say this with impunity because I know history had no garbage bin too for me, so I am immune to further questioning by law), that a code of content is much required for the media…

Till we learn to behave.

At the moment, we are not!