By Ranjona Banerji
Watching interviews of Kanhaiya Kumar on TV, JNU student and president of the Students’ Union, you understand why he is popular in his little world. What you cannot understand is the frankly shoddy quality of the interviewers on TV. Either they treated Kanhaiya like he was the next messiah with all the answers in the world or they tried to bamboozle and trip him up.
In both cases, the young Kanhaiya got the better of seasoned TV journalists. He kept calm, sounded reasonable and put forward his views without decibel fluctuation and with a smile on his face. To put it simply, he played them. A good interview has to be carefully crafted and organised. You have to create a format and a flow. It can be linear or circular. If you are very good at your craft, it can even be progressive where one answer leads to the next question. But when an interview is false, stilted and staccato, it loses its essence.
I understand that it is more difficult to do interviews as a TV journalist than as a print journalist. On TV, you are as much on air as the interviewee and although this makes you a star it also exposes your shortcomings. Your brilliance and your stupidity are both on display. In print, you are behind the camera, you are the questions in bold and you have time and you have editing skills at your disposal.
From what I have understood of TV journalism in India, editing skills are only used when you want to doctor videos to trap Kanhaiya! Okay, was that below the belt? If I have to be kinder, why not use those editing skills a bit more?
What happened with the Kanhaiya TV interviews is that the agendas and egos of the interviewers showed through. And also, at the risk of being lynched, perhaps there is some advantage to getting a PhD from JNU after all?!
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Although prime time TV debates in India are usually abysmally painful on the eardrums and therefore unwatchable, watching all the outrage over industrialist Vijay Mallya was quite amusing. Every news channel played over and over images of Mallya at a party with a glass of something in his hand, Mallya surrounded by models and film stars and famous people, Mallya busy having a social life.
While our TV anchors were very angry with Mallya for not paying former Kingfisher employees and for having so much fun on money he had taken by public sector banks, industrialists and businesspeople were quite sympathetic about Mallya’s predicament. For one, possibly none of them ever had so much fun on borrowed money and two, maybe they were thinking, “There, but for the grace of god, go Iâ€.
Although TV anchors and commentators were worried about the terrible state of Kingfisher employees, industrialists we could see were not quite that sympathetic. Everyone agreed though that Mallya should not have lived such a lifestyle on public sector bank money. Maybe they were all hiding their Kingfisher swimsuit calendars for all I know.
The trigger was the debt tribunal refusing to let Mallya access his bye-bye deal from Diageo. The problem however is much older than that. Hopefully we have not heard the last of this.
Also on some channels was the controversy over HRD minister Smriti Irani. Don’t groan, this is not my fault. Her cavalcade got involved in an accident. Or maybe it didn’t. Or maybe it did. Someone died. Irani claimed on Twitter that she had helped and organised help. The victim’s family said she didn’t. Twitter said Times Now blanked out the story. Is that true
Other channels were preoccupied with saving the Yamuna from a massive Art of Living Sri Sri Ravi Shankar event. I have a simple point to make here. Whatever damage was being done to the Yamuna was happening over months. It would have been better journalism if the Delhi-based media had focused on this programme a little earlier.