Television news channels are increasingly turning news into entertainment. They have all the ingredients required for a potboiler-crime, religion, politics and patriotism.
The cacophony around television debates ‘claimed’ its first victim, the Congress party spokesperson Rajiv Tyagi, who died soon after he had been part of a discussion on a Hindi news channel. And as accusations flew fast and thick, nobody felt the need to press the pause button, even for a few seconds, to mourn the loss of a person who they had been inviting to their studios till a day before.
The format of inviting panelist to discuss the top news of the day, adopted by the news channels since more than five years, has now turned into a free for all slanging match between the participants with the anchor taking sides in accordance with the agenda the channel pushes. And as the bulk of channels are toeing the line of the current establishment, those from the opposition have to be real tough nuts to survive the onslaught.
More like tamasha
Television news channels are increasingly turning news into entertainment. They have all the ingredients required for a potboiler-crime, religion, politics and patriotism. So, they now serve it in an exaggerated form more like a tamasha. Replicating scenarios like death in a bath tub or death by suicide and how an autopsy is performed are some of the ways in which the news is presented. But this is still not sufficient to hold the eyeballs.
A verbal dual over current issues can be interesting. Viewers find resonance of their point of view and immediately get divided to take sides. In the current environment of vicious trolls and social media fights, we have increasingly become less sensitive towards vituperative and vitriolic expression of thoughts. The anchors have, however jumped on to it. They understand that giving a voice to the deeply seated and unspoken sentiments of the viewers fetch better TRPs. So, when Arnab Goswami yells his lungs out baying for the blood of Maharashtra ministers and bureaucrats, he has the entire Bihari population, right down to the ones in villages, glued to the screens. When Deepak Chaurasia breathes down the face of a Muslim panelist, calling him an anti-national, the right-wing radicals applaud and scream for more. And when Rohit Sardana quietly eggs on Sambit Patra, even as the later calls Rajiv Tyagi ‘Jaichand’ the liberals are stunned and Tyagi “succumbs” to the insults which hurt him deep. His wife accused that his last words were, “inhone mujhe maar daala.”
Eighties era
Way back in the eighties when Doordarshan launched the National network, news reading was a staid job. Two news readers, a male and a female would read out the day’s events in a staccato voiced telecast interspersed with visuals. The dress code was traditional. The women wore handloom saris and men Nehru or a bandhgala jacket. The talking point around these news segments were the flowers occasionally worn in hair by the ladies or the pen worn in the pocket by the male readers. Yet the viewers remained glued and hung on to every word while the half hour segment was aired at 8pm and 10pm.
It was during the nineties with the advent of independent news channels that the anchors and newsreaders began to appear like desi rip offs of US and British television personalities like Peter Jennings, Brian Williams or George Alagiah. The traditional attire was replaced with sharp suits for both genders. The language, depending upon the medium, was colloquial. Now it is downright abusive. Anchors let panellist use swear words and once they are spoken, they take a moral high ground of ‘no unparliamentary language please’.
As society gets deeply polarized, one doesn’t know how further down will the standards hurtle. What is certain is that channel heads themselves will have to do a course correction. Ravish Kumar recently did an entire Prime Time segment lampooning the news channels. But satire is not the solution. It will require honest soul searching and a commitment towards the viewers to get back on track to deliver news as what it is.
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