Of Breaking News' and Exclusives

The effort to blog more frequently has resumed. Ironically when its the most hectic time of the year for me. Its 11 in the night as I write, a couple of burgers and a beer await me and we still have about atleast 2 hours of work left in the cellar. And yes I started at 9 this morning and will do tomorrow as well, quite early for my standards. I will be more than happy to swap places with anybody who thinks winemaking is romantic at this very moment in time.

Moving on. The fine line between journalism and entertainment for Indian news channels, both English and regional, has been blurred for quite a while now. Especially for the Hindi news channels where the news tends to range from exaggerated hum drum affairs to bizarre sensationalism. The English news channels were fairly news centric in the time of Star News (before it went Hindi) and NDTV. But with the entry of Times Now, CNN-IBN and a handful of others, there is a tendency to sensationalism and repetition across channels.

Case for example, last night there was an interview of Home Minister PC Chidambaram being aired on NDTV billed as an exclusive. The topics of discussion ranged from security arrangements for elections to IPL clashing dates to the attach on SL cricketers in Pakistan. Fairly routine stuff, nothing you wouldn't find in the morning newspaper as well. Now just I was finished seeing it and switched over the CNN-IBN, lo and behold, there was none other than PC Chidambaram himself being interviewed on the same issues and again billed as an exclusive, a point driven home by Rajdeep Sardesai himself. Now certainly 2 channels cannot carry the same exclusive on the same day, on the same issues and following each other on the night. My understanding of an exclusive news story is one available to noone but that particular news channels or media.

The other part is the breaking news factor. I think many mundane news stories are billed as supposedly breaking news' probably to gain eyeballs at any particular time of the day. Breaking news was meant to be a kind of a showstopper equivalent. Mind you there are the actual ones, but there are far too many irrelevant ones. Another point is the lack of perspective sometimes. Every Indian cricket win is taken is a monumental event and every loss a disaster. There no middle ground. Experts, analysts, politicians, sportsmen, celebrities, victims, perpetrators, etc are put on the spot and forced to pick sides with no room for a middle ground. A bit like George W Bush's "with us or against us" approach to fighting terror. There can only be black and white, no shades of grey. Atleast when people are asked to vote on a question via SMS's. So many times it turns into a trial by media. Comes

I must say Times Now has quite specialised in a daily dose of political bull fighting between the Congress and the BJP. The issues may be different, but the daily speakers on both sides tend to remain the same and the debate is a "holier than thou" type rather than one of logic.

One of the aspects about news reporting and TV journalism that fascinated me in my time in the UK was the funding structure of the BBC. It was totally funded by the public via TV licenses. So they need not advertise directly for revenue to fund the channel. So the mandate the is to provide news and reporting completely unbiased, impartial and without having to worry about where the money is going to come from. The BBC website I have seen recently have started advertising, but I am pretty sure the bouquet of channels do not. So its fair to conclude that a documentary or news being shown on BBC has higher chances of being authentic and accurate compared to a channel funded purely by advertisers money.

Advertising money is in my opinion one of the reasons why most Indian news channels focus more on what the people want to see and hear as news rather than accurately reporting the daily happenings around. Yes, there are some thought provoking news reports, debates and documentaries, but I am talking about the overall scenario here. In India, 3 things sell the most. Politics, Bollywood & Cricket. Well we can add religion to the list as well. So invariably a high number of news reports include one of the above topics which are then even further spiced up and presented as entertainment. Ad revenue is dictated by TRP's and as a result news reporting is turning into a medium of entertainment to garner as many eyeballs as possible.

There's always hope till the next 'Breaking News and/or Exclusive'......

Ps.. Azeem, if you are reading, thanks for pushing some life into the blog. And it almost 4 hours of work since I ate!!