It’s true. Compare the headlines of the nightlies with what you have in the papers the morning after. So we asked Dr Bhaskar Das this question. And here’s what he had to say in the Feb 9 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on…
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Q. The headlines on news channels is in sharp variance to the headlines in the papers the next morning. Surely the medium couldn’t be dictating the content mix so much. Your view?
A. TV is a here and now medium. It breaks stories. It updates. Newspapers by nature upgrade and hence follow a pattern of featurising current topics through analyses or breaking into stories. So, both the medium play their role as complementing readers’ hierarchy of needs and wants. Any comparison would be an exercise in futility. Besides, TV is an active medium with passive audience (in digital age need not be) , whereas print is passive medium with active audience. The expectations of audiences are very different.