Gone are the golden days when we used to find our solace in reading Wordsworth, Munshi Premchand and the likes of them. Now, we sit in front of our great Idiot Box (who has undergone radical slimming cycles) and look....
At what? anything that seems to occupy satellite wave-space. We do not care whether its someone's personal life being splashed on TV or whether its someone's death being announced. Every news is just another piece of ITEM to us.
& why are we so? We are so busy with our lives, that we really do not care. We watch the news, just because we feel guilty of NOT CARING about the world. & hence, we see, we discuss, we gossip, call up people & feign interest.
But, at the heart of it, we are still just passing our time. When we go to sleep, we neither care, nor want to deliver on any issue. & this brings us to the larger state of our nation: IMPASSIVITY.
I am guilty of being an Anglophile to some extent. BBC news has been providing quality programmes as far as my memory goes. They do not bring up "Ganpati drank milk" and "Recreation of a rape / blast / accident". They just show the news & move on. Rest of the airtime deals with news too, but news that mean something. Our desi channels have yet to learn that NEWS does not mean showing ONLY the breaking clips. It also means, making sense of it (yes, there are those programs, but then..how many are they?), creating documentations on it & showing them. After the Iraq war, BBC showed a documentary of the entire war, with its different angles. I don't think our channels have done anything more than hosting talk shows where they call the politicians & citizens, and arrange a cat-fight.
How long will they take to understand that one cannot move ahead by showing exotic clips? If quality is a parameter, i guess our news channels are guilty of shooting in the dark?
& oh yes, 177 died today in some hill in Rajasthan, as Chief minister of Maharashtra announced 5 lac compensation for bomb blast victims in malegaon, while our cricket team gets ready for yet another unending series, and Abhishek Bachan says hes a cool young man while his father was the angry young man.
You just read the top headlines shown some time ago, in about 20 seconds. Make sense, anything? Now imagine these guys showing the same headline every half hour for the next 2 days!! Some news, eh?
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5 comments:
Rooney's email to me:
True, the focus is more on yellow journalism. Not only the channels, but also the print media falls short of our expectations! Imagine a headlines that says, "Can I get a Bathroom break??" (refer to TOI headlines showing a pic of Bush Jr. writing these words as a note to Condi at a UN Gen Assembly meet in Sep 2005) Not only the news item is immaterial to the readers, but i also call it a crass invasion of privacy. Believe me, we might smile looking at that picture, but we wouldn't be any worse off without getting access to Bush's note. However much we love to hate Bush (though our PM thinks otherwise), he cannot be subject to such treatment especially by a newspaper that boasts of the 3rd largest circulation.
What angers me more is the frequent use of the term "Breaking News". I thought this term was to be used as frugally as the the death knell that rings on the death of the Pope. You saved this usage for a news worthy of catching your attention and forcing you to leave everything aside...say BREAKING NEWS: "Lady Di critical after a road accident" or BREAKING NEWS: "India tests its nuclear capabilities at Pokhran". On the contrary, this is what we read these days, BREAKING NEWS: "9-yr old Prince Falls into a Tube-well"...come on!! With due concern for the child, is he the first child to accidently fall into a tube-well?? What baffles me more is how quickly 'THE Breaking News' dissipates and is replaced by another- BREAKING NEWS: "Indian cricket team returns from Bangladesh"!!!!!! What happened to the child in the tube-well??
This was about the quality of the news that we watch. Now how distorted the facts are sometimes stated...for eg: Sports page shows a still of a football match that took place over the weekend in Manchester. The caption says," Rooney getting tackled by [so and so] of [such and such] team during a match played on Saturday in Manchester, London" LONDON!!??? And this happens repeatedly. At first this made me check my map...just to see if Manchester was a part of London! Now i can only get miffed and move on. This is just one of the innumerable specimen i can quote.
I feel, the corporatization and the amount of money involved in this business has driven these agencies to focus on just what the masses want. But the masses also want dance bars and liquor in Gujarat. But do we have to cater to all their needs and that too by stooping so low? But as i mentioned this is what almost guarantees a healthy bottom line. So the solution: Lets go back to our good old Doordarshan...however staid and comic the entire show seems to be...it still manages to deliver the REAL news. Try the 10 minute crisp news on 96.7 FM...it still has the charm.
Mufaazaa's email to me:
It was the same news channel that brought the murderer of Jessica Lal to justice. The same news channels that actually unearthed the Nithari horror, the Kargil war, the coffin scandal (I could name it as any "xyz" scandal and you could be rest assured that somewhere in India itself, something bearing that particular title would have occured). It was news channels that actually pushed the newspapers to redundancy. Is the quality of news poor? No! Its abysmal. However, the strength of the medium remains enshrined in the roots of its creation. To spread awareness. To eliminate information arbitrage. So, today its these channels that have actually made us aware of the superficial state of our lives, the volatility of the modern world, bridging the gap between the turmoil of uncertainty to the certainty of turmoil. Maybe, we need to up the ante on the quality of our collective receptive attitude!
There can be seldom anything more inspiring than to see your concern being discussed, shared & replied @ dawn!
Thank you guys,
I will try to answer the same asap.
Honshu5
"Dada scripts another comeback"!! "A final fling for Sourav"!! ...
Sourav Ganguly retained his spot in the national team for the forthcoming Indo Australian test series (yeah Sandy, there is an India Australia test series starting from the 9th. of October). Strangely, none of this seemed relevant. In fact, it almost seemed farcical given the news that preceded it.
18 Indian sailors (along with a host of others) lay hostage to Somalian pirates somewhere out there and the wife of the captain spoke softly on the national television, urging her husband, who had all but given up hope, to garner some, to hold strong and to believe that freedom would come. She spoke firmly, her tone not betraying the turmoil life's savagery had laid at her steps, seeking an appointment with the PM to beseech his help. The prime minister, for his part, issued a typically prime ministrial statement of reassurance that would have served to pillage whatever little hope the family members of those hostages were carrying. Be that as it may, somewhere, the wife of that captain, alongside 18 other families tethered their hopes on that one chance they got to address the nation and share with it, if for a brief moment, their utter despair.
AND IT WAS A NEWS CHANNEL THAT GAVE THEM THAT ONE CHANCE!!
Forgive me, if I may seem to ruthlessly hack at the premises upon which you have laid your critique of news channels, but perhaps, we as viewers need the "bathroom break" of Bush Jr., to help us cloud our conscience, for realistically, just how many of us would, leave alone stage a real effort to stir the government mechanism into action to release those hostages, even leave the comfortable cushions of our musings to help the person in distress across the street!!
After all isn't Ganguly's image being splashed over the "Breaking News" tag more palatable than Captain Shukla breaking down over the radio to his wife?
After all, aren't we the news that we want to see?
Hatikwah dude..
What you are saying is not unknown to me. I am not denying the power of media, print or television.
But that is a given. I am definitely proud that our age has acquired the tools where a common citizen is given the chance to come on stage & speak for him / herself.
I am proud every day our local Ahmedabad Mirror publishes peoples complains to our Municipal Corporation and also rates the officers according to problems solved or pending. Those are amazing initiatives, and it would be sacrosanct to deny them.
However, everything must be taken with a pinch of salt. When somebody feeds us, he or she does not gain the right to murder us, just because they gave us life-support when we needed it.
In the same manner, I wished to bring about the problem of self-regulation in media. They will stop at nothing to gain the current news, be it somebody's wife or Saurav's strife.
The very idea that they will catch anything that suits their TRP is criminal to me. This is because they misuse the very trust that we show them, OUR BELIEF IN THEM.
If a TV channel shows Mr. Talwar as a criminal, there is hard chance public opinion about him will change even if the evidence finds him innocent. & I am not even starting to talk about his mental state after being bombarded with the same news everyday.
Think about it. I had a professor (lawyer) whom we quizzed about why Indian democracy should be held better than China's?
His reply:
In India the government has to ask us before taking any step. Now this leads to eons of delays, but it tries to ensure everybody gets a say.
In China, they come with a bulldozer at night to your house, and by morning there is an 8 lane highway, leaving you homeless.
My point being, we need to move on to media democracy. In a TV set we are bound to watch whatever is shown, without second opinion (even though there are so many TV Channels, coz everybody gets same TRP). Even though I DONT want to hear about Sourav, there he is, either on screen, or popping up as the ugly ticker running below...
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