By Ranjona Banerji
Reading Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto has put me in a nostalgic as well as interrogatory frame of mind, especially about how newsrooms operate. Dr Gawande’s contention is remarkable in its simplicity and its good sense: how having a checklist helps or hinders a process. He found, through research, trial and error that five minutes spent on checklists can save lives, prevent accidents and reduce human error. His main objective was to reduce deaths on the operating table. But it took him on a journey that included flight and construction checklists – two areas of human endeavour where checklists are the norm rather than the exception – and several others where so many simple mistakes should make checklists mandatory.
I have worked in a number of newsrooms, all different. Some totally chaotic, some regimented by years of experience, some bound by alchemy, some riven by professional antipathy. But all them I realise could have done with that simple checklist. In all of these newsrooms we were trapped in the fallacy of our own knowledge and experience in spite of all the mistakes being made around us.
Some newsrooms had some simple rules, some even put up on notice boards, mainly for sub-editors. Check headlines, captions, intros before releasing a page for instance. But that is now one of those customs more practised in the breach, as Shakespeare put it. One age-old practice was the post-mortem where the editor went through the previous day’s or week’s or month’s issue marking out all the errors. Over the years, even this vital input appears to have been abandoned. And this is evident to any close follower of the news media.
I can hear editors saying that they are too busy. But that is hogwash. For one, the editor’s role has been marginalised and diminished by managements and owners and today’s editors have played along with it just to keep their positions. For the other, it is just sheer laziness. Some newsrooms outsource the analysis, which sounds okay but is in fact a waste of time. The correction has to come from the top.
I have no knowledge of how news television operates. But this much is clear from the outside – it appears to be almost systemless in its breathless hysteria to get everywhere first. Often those in the studio have no idea what the reporters on the field are talking about, almost all the competitors try and mimic each other and when they get their collective teeth into one news bone, it is as if nothing else is happening in the Universe. I believe those in charge of news programming are called “producers†which seems apt because I doubt that they know what “editing†means.
As Gawande puts it, “We don’t study routine failuresâ€. And that is the crux of the matter.
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I did not watch Rajdeep Sardesai’s interview with tennis star Sania Mirza on India Today TV. But reading the transcript, it is clear that even a journalist of Sardesai’s experience can fall into a facile patriarchy trap. Or even just a facile trap. I don’t know if this is an intrinsic failing of the TV interview where you lose good sense in trying to be all chummy with the interviewee or just a massive error of judgment.
Sardesai asked Mirza if she is going to “settle down†and about motherhood.
Mirza had a sharp reply, asking “You don’t think I’m settled?†and then going on to talk about how she is asked this all the time as a woman: “No matter how many Wimbledons we win or world number ones we become, we don’t become settled.â€
Sardesai apologised immediately.
But perhaps here’s a good reason for a checklist before you interview someone: Yvonne Goolagong Cawley and Kim Clijsters are only two female tennis players who won major titles after motherhood. And current male tennis stars like Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray are all fathers.
Of course, patriarchy is a blight that will possibly never be “settled†in my lifetime at least no matter how many checklists I make.