Penblunt & Hogwash

All in the name of News

I am aghast.

So long I have been find ‘mischief’ in the name of news the Hindi television channels; but here the so called a sophisticated English news channel has transgressed boundaries of ethical journalism.

Pinaki has been asking me about those English and Hindi news channels that I commented upon as clean and better than the rest, and invariably cackled and scoffed every time I mentioned the names I had in mind.

Now, I am aghast with what they have done in the case of the Raj Thackrey fostered violence against north Indians in the central Indian state of Maharashtra.

Just a few words on the imbroglio, or else you’d not get the angle.

Raj Thackrey is the nephew of Bal Thackrey, who heads a retrograde Hindu chauvinistic outfit called Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva), and Raj was an important part of the central leadership of the Sena.

That is, till he fell out with Bal Thackeray’s son and his cousin, Uddhav Thakray and started his own outfit, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, acronymed MNS, the name meaning “Army for rebuilding Maharashtra.”

It is a fact that vast volumes of unskilled labourers and skilled workers of all denominations from many north Indian states have fanned out into various parts of India, as they have in Maharashtra too. And they do an awful lot of work at highly competitive wages.

In the ‘70s, Bal Thackrey had pitch forked himself into the political mainframe of the state by tirading against these north Indians, but over the years, this issue had simmered.

Early this month, Raj, to upstage Uddhav and cull out some of the latter’s vote bank, had issued a fatwa against these north Indians and almost immediately violence flared up, perpetrated by MNS ‘soldiers’.

This is the scenario that warranted TV news coverage, and they all went berserk. All. Even the ones I had fondly thought of as moderate and clean.

To start with, the main violence happened on a Sunday two weeks ago, and all of the next day, Monday, the channels, all of them, kept showing those incidents of violence repeatedly, hour on hour, hour after hour.

Sitting in the lounge of just such a channel, waiting to meet the editor in chief, I watched this violence on the soundless TV set and was scared at how fast the thing was spreading.

It was not!

The violence had ignited that Sunday, and had been brought under control within a few hours, but the channels never once mentioned in the scenes that these were file videos of the previous day.

I think that was enough to keep the violent mood ready, as naturally, the north Indians would feel what I had felt, about being targeted for two days non-stop, and react, for how long can one hide and sob?

This was a clear and purposeful distortion, for this was what the media bosses here feel is what people wants to watch: “interesting, eye catching shots”.

So what if the repeats lead to a spread of rioting? All the better for the channels, for they would have more gory (interesting, eye catching) shots to run not for the day but for the next two, may be three days.

But worse was to come.

A few days later, the Maharashtra government mustered enough courage to arrest Raj Thackeray. They requested the Central Government for military support, just to arrest a petty politician poaching on his cousin’s turf.

And the amazing thing was that the editor in chief of the channel which boasts of being the best and cleanest, flew down to Bombay to cover a tiny communal flareup!

And from his office in Bombay (not from the scene of arrest and violence) he conducted a non-stop BREAKING NEWS run (so what if all the channels were getting the same clips?).

I am sure the editor in chief did know that nowhere do editors in chief get down to reporting minor communal violence, and that he did so to give the coverage a high voltage, (“none less than Mr Rajdip Sardesai covered the riots, boss!”).

As if that were not enough, as the cameras showed Raj being arrested and there poured in reports of violence from the districts (with the Bombay cameramen ruing that the city remained peaceful, with nothing interesting and eye catching to show), the channel started showing… guess?

The scenes of violence in Bombay last week!

The editor in chief had solved the problems of absence of violence in the financial capital of India on the day when he in person had gone to report.

Sitting in my Bombay office, wondering if I would be able to catch the late evening flight to Delhi, I was, as I said, aghast….

There was no marker stating that the scenes were from a week ago, no “Library video of last week” mentioned on the screens, as if that violence was taking place in the streets of Bombay there and then as a response to Raj Thackeray’s arrest.

(I have run out of exclamation marks by now…)

Even worse was this sequence of shots:

1. Raj Thackeray being taken to court on February 13
2. Scuffles of supporters outside the court, February 13, with the camera angle kept low so that a small crowd looks like a huge melee of hundreds
3. And then, (this one was just too much) as video clip Raj Thackeray at a political rally, some years ago, raising a sword above his head in a symbolic gesture of assured violence.

That shot took the icing, the cake and the box in which the cake had arrived, and ran them all down Sardesai’s channel into a toxic gutter called TRP.

Shame on you, Sardesai, I once admired you and even fought with a dear friend like Pinaki over your credibility….

Now give me a space to hide…but of course, not in your home, NO!