MxMIndia

Category: RANJONA BANERJI

Ranjona Banerji’s hard-and-soft look at nightly news and the fare in the morningers

  • In the Friday edition of 'Freaking News': News channels must invest in silencer buttons for unruly panellists

    Ranjona Banerji: TV debates are sound, fury with nothing significant

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    TV debates, it should now be universally acknowledged, have become a bore. This is not the fault of the news channels but of their guests. Though I suppose one could blame them for not getting better guests the way you might disagree with the way a newspaper chooses its columnists or edit page writers. I digress. Since my cablewallah condescended to give me CNN-IBN again, I decided to try and watch it. Karan Thapar on The Last Word tried to work out what he called the “natak in Karnatak”. A needless pun perhaps, based on two different language families being expressed in a third language, but never mind. Nirmala Seetharaman of the BJP was probably tired of being politely defensive so barely let anyone speak. Earlier in the week on Times Now, Smriti Irani as part of a discussion on P Chidambaram’s comment about the middle class being happy to spend money on ice-cream and bottled water but not petrol, shouted so much that she drowned everyone else out. She also moved the subject around so much that the rest of the guests were left quite bemused.

     

    Even more puzzled was Nidhi Razdan of NDTV on Thursday night when a discussion on Sharad Yadav’s comment that temple funds need some sort of regulation was turned into some long defence of Hindus being targeted by Tarun Vijay of the BJP. The other guests were equally amazed since no one had said anything derogatory about Hindus. Most in fact felt the government had a bad track record in managing temple funds and that was not the solution. In the second discussion on Razdan’s show about PA Sangma’s presidential campaign, Vijay accused senior journalist Kumar Ketkar of being prejudiced against people from the North-east even though Ketkar had not said a word about the North-east at all.

     

    Does this sound like I’m targeting spokespersons for the BJP? It is however surprising that for a party which is so media savvy normally, it has to depend on people who are so incapable of carrying on a discussion in a civilised manner. They just make the other parties look better, even if they are hardly deserving of that.

     

    I could not watch CNN-IBN any further because it went back to the fight in the civil aviation apparatus over Kingfisher Airlines which Arnab Goswami also took on later. By this time I was bored and the faces all looked the same. Headlines Today had no sound so I could not indulge myself in the battles of the two Rahuls.

     

    The fight against “apathy” and “indifference” on Times Now remains interesting however. The squirming by doctors as they tried to somehow explain why ward boys and cleaners were standing in for them in UP hospitals was amusing, especially when they were attacked by members of the public. The strike by UP doctors also attacked by callers, to which there was really no answer.

     

    But at the end of all this, these debates are just sound and fury signifying nothing. It is not the media’s job to find solutions but there is not even any food for thought to be found in these discussions. People invited to TV studios need to work a little harder on how they sound when they lose control of their thought processes and their behaviour. They’re becoming like MLAs in our legislative assembles. News channels must invest in silencer buttons for unruly panellists. Or come down to the lowest common denominator and become like the Jerry Springer show with physical combat as part of the entertainment.

     

  • Had the story not been shown on TV, would there have been such an uproar? But then did the journalists incite the violence as has been alleged?

    Ranjona Banerji: Media was hero & villain of Guwahati horror

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The media turned out to be the villain and the hero last week. The case was the same – the shameful and horrific molestation of a young girl on a busy street in Guwahati last Monday night. The girl was apparently coming out of a bar where she had gone to celebrate a birthday party. She was then attacked by a mob which beat her and stripped her for about half an hour till the police arrived. The reason for the attack seems unclear as yet but it is enough to say that no reason is justification enough. What increases the shame is that there were several bystanders – it was about 9 in the evening and the area was crowded – who did nothing but watch.

     

    A local TV channel, Newslive caught the incident on camera. One version is that a passing reporter from the channel alerted his office. Another is that the channel “got to hear” and came rushing out. Editors of the channel claim that its employees called the police. The DGP says the call came from a neighbouring hotel. The editors of the channel also claimed that they debated for a whole day about whether to show the footage or not and decided that it was in best journalistic interests to show it, if only to help catch the perpetrators. The incident was televised on Tuesday. By Thursday it was picked up by the national media and went viral on the internet as well.

     

    By Friday, it was the news of the day everywhere. Most news channels showed it, blurring the victim’s face. She appeared to be a young girl being brutalised by this mob of men. The men’s faces were seen clearly. Most channels also interacted with viewers who were obviously outraged.

     

    In the early evening on Friday, Times Now put its own spin on the story and decided that it was not going to show the footage because it would only lead to the victim being further traumatised. The channel said it would only show the faces of the attackers. It then asked its viewers to call in and discuss whether the channel was right or not.
    The media itself was now an integral part of the story. The first question is one that journalists regularly face when covering such events – should they do their job and observe, collect information or should they have a human reaction and help. It is a difficult problem and probably has to be answered on a case by case basis by the individuals involved. But it is fair to ask whether the journalists on this case needed to watch for half an hour without stepping in. This was not a war, this was a street fight. One journalist appeared on TV saying he was too frightened by the mob. Headlines Today interviewed the girl, face blurred, who said she was begging for help which did not come.

     

    Rajdeep Sardesai, editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN, tried to grill Assam DGP Jayanta Narayan Chaudhury on why so few arrests had been made and why the police took half an hour to arrive but only got anodyne answers.

     

    Then there is the issue of whether showing the footage served any purpose. The sad fact is that had Newslive not shown the story, no one would have known about it nor seen, in all its horror, what such an attack looks like. The anger which was felt across the country was precisely because people saw what happened. Just reading or hearing about it is not quite so moving. The helplessness of the girl, the glee on the men’s faces – the brutish nature of the human condition was laid bare for all to see. Was Times Now therefore being too squeamish or even self-righteous?

     

    Also, by showing the incident, the faces of the men were clearly seen and some were even identified. (It is another matter that the main culprit, Amar Jyoti Kalita, also identified by his Facebook page, is still absconding.) Many viewers pointed this out to Times Now.

     

    However, the involvement of the media has now become murkier. An India Against Corruption activist from Assam, Akhil Gogoi, has handed over footage to the police which shows Gaurav Jyoti Neog, a journalist with Newslive, inciting the mob to molest the girl. Gogoi showed the footage at the Guwahati Press Club. Neog has resigned his job and said he is “cooperating” with the investigation.

     

    If indeed Gogoi’s allegations are correct, then the shame on the media is incalculable. Sadly this is not the first time that TV journalists have been accused of inciting people to horrific acts just to get a story. But some attempts need to be made to ensure that this is the last. The Indian media has enough problems without walking down the News of the World road to get a scoop.

     

  • Ranjona Khanna on: the Rajesh Khanna coverage on TV and print, how the news overshadowed that of Rahul Gandhi’s ascension and the latest Outlook cover

    Ranjona Banerji: How TV and print covered Rajesh Khanna

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The death of superstar actor Rajesh Khanna was felt very deeply by the Indian media. Although Khanna had been largely forgotten in the PR driven-celebrity obsessed circus that we now live in – except for his foray into an ad which many found offensive – his death brought out a tidal wave of nostalgia. Everyone tried to look back on their Rajesh Khanna moments and several actually found them.

     

    On Wednesday, TV followed its normal procedures, which in the current climate is outrage at various discriminatory procedures heaped on hapless citizens by ourselves or others. But once news of Khanna’s death came in, everything else came to a standstill.

     

    Is there scope for criticism here? There can be no doubt that Khanna was an enormous star and in his heyday, he was so high as to be untouchable. He was also a bit unfathomable, which made him all the more appealing. Many TV anchors – notably Nidhi Razdan of NDTV and Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN – found it hard to believe that Khanna did not “reinvent” himself in his later years. Their bewilderment is understandable. In a world where everyone endlessly (apparently) craves for fame, this man retreated once the world moved on. Of course, in Rajesh Khanna’s case this is not really true. He did try a few times to come back but it just didn’t work. Then, he retreated. But facts are often difficult to muster when you don’t have personal knowledge and everyone around you is 11 years old.

     

    Arnab Goswami jumped into the Times Now studio much before the appointed time but he was clearly clueless about Rajesh Khanna’s days in the sun. Most news channels therefore pulled out the guests they could – Shobhaa De, since the rise of Stardust coincided with the rise of Khanna, Shabana Azmi who acted with him later, Mahesh Bhatt who made his name a little later and Javed Akhtar, who wrote some of his films with Salim Khan (who is almost never acknowledged by the media although he is very much around). Sharmila Tagore was interviewed – she was the star with whom he had his biggest hit Aradhana.

     

    The biggest confusion was between Khanna the actor and the songs in his films. Few TV journalists seemed familiar with playback singing and the fact that Khanna did not sing anything and the songs in the movies had nothing to do with him. Endearing journalistic naivete or the need for a few more celebrity news anchors from Mumbai?

     

    However, at the end of Wednesday, one might conjecture that there was no need for TV panel discussions on why Rajesh Khanna was so popular. It’s not the sort of subject that needs to be debated the day a man dies. It’s not even a subject for debate really.

     

    **

     

    The newspapers the next day obviously did a more comprehensive job, especially the Times of India since it has better archival resources and institutional memory. It is at times like this that the youth tilt in the media at the moment becomes a liability. Wikipedia cannot give you everything you need to know. Also lack of journalistic imagination is a hindrance – although it seems to be very common – and this was evident in both Hindustan Times and DNA.

     

    Mumbai Mirror carried an informed and incisive piece by De, best qualified to do so. Mid-Day’s front page headline told us that Jatin Khanna is dead while Rajesh Khanna lives on, a play on the transience of life but the permanence of memory. Indian Express treated it like one more news story.

     

    **

     

    Since Khanna’s funeral procession saw unexpected crowds, his death practically overshadowed Rahul Gandhi’s ascension to who-knows-what in the Congress party on Friday morning.

     

    **

     

    Outlook’s latest cover is on Barack Obama, headlined “The Underachiever”, mimicking the recent Time magazine cover on Manmohan Singh. It may seem funny at first glance – I thought it was a joke, actually – but it is surely a tad childish. Why should an Indian newsmagazine take up cudgels for the prime minister? Time has a right to its opinion and is not Obama’s mouthpiece. Why should Outlook want to look like the PM’s mouthpiece?

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: TV news viewing can be injurious to the lower jaw

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Since president-elect Pranab Mukherjee spoke to almost everyone on Tuesday, it was hard to see why news channels rushed to qualify their interviews as “first” or “better” or whatever. Exclusive, in TV parlance, is apparently when you do the same thing as everyone else, except five minutes before.

     

    Anyway, Mukherjee did not say very much about anything he was going to do as President although he talked about his childhood and his early political career. The silliest question I reckon came from Sagorika Ghose of CNN-IBN who asked whether Mukherjee’s ascension to Rashtrapati Bhavan was a “return of Bengal to the mainstream”. At this point my jaw dropped so low that it fell off and I was so busy retrieving it that I couldn’t pay attention to the rest of the interview.

     

    The best I could get from Arnab Goswami’s interview with Mukherjee on Times Now was that first Mukherjee walked round his garden 40 times, then 33 times and now 30 times and he did not know how many times he was going to walk around the Mughal Gardens. He said he heard the gardens were very large. Anyway, as President he will have ample time to work out stuff like that. Or if he asks someone they might tell him how big the Mughal Gardens are.

     

    * * *

     

    Sunday was all about the presidential election as well as everyone gave us live coverage. Of course, after some time they ran out of things to say because there was very little to say about a presidential election in India, at least not enough that can last a whole day even given TV’s marvellous propensity for waffling on about nothing. The highlight of the day was losing candidate PA Sangma’s losing speech. He started by congratulating Mukherjee and then went into a whine about how the Congress had used bribery, extortion and threats to ensure Mukherjee’s victory and how the North East and betrayed not just him but all tribals and themselves as well. (They didn’t vote for him.) Sangma’s entire campaign was based on pettiness, so nothing surprising here. What was surprising was Navika Kumar of Times Now stating emphatically that this was the best, most gracious and most sportsmanlike speech she has ever heard from a loser. Her guests Krishna Prasad of Outlook and commentator NN Satchidanand tried to point out otherwise, but she would have none of it. Jaw-retrieval is a common affliction for those who watch too much TV news, as I should know by now.

     

    * * *

     

    Rupert Murdoch has stepped down from several boards which control News Corp’s titles in the US, UK and India. The pressure to do so apparently came from investors, after the phone-hacking scandal led to the closing of The News of the World and all the arrests of News Corp staff, current and former. Murdoch’s rise saw a lot of bile but in his fall are some abject lessons for media bosses and for those journalists who decide that principles are nothing when faced with corporate pressure to perform in a particular manner or to do anything to get results. The Nuremberg trials ought to be required reading for young aspiring journalists: the fact that you got an order is not defence enough.

     

    * * *

     

    I was appalled yesterday and continue to be appalled today about Monday’s front page anchor in The Times of India about a group of Indian athletes that went to the 1936 Berlin Games under a saffron flag singing Vande Mataram and impressed Adolf Hitler enough to give the group a medal. The story behaved as if getting a medal from the 20th century’s most frightening dictator was a great honour. There was not a squeak in the story about Nazism and what the organiser of the group thought of that. The glorification of Nazism in India is restricted to those influenced by the religious nationalism that comes of out of Nagpur. The story, therefore, should have mentioned or questioned the RSS connections of the group. Saffron flags and Vande Mataram were clear giveaways but why not come out openly and say so? And for a journalist – and a newspaper – to ignore the Nazi angle to such a story is criminal.

     

    * * *

     

    Vikram Doctor’s article in The Economic Times on food and the Olympics was extremely readable and well-researched. Try it: http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/onmyplate/entry/thanks-to-french-humour-here-s-best-of-british-food

     

     

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: Why I love Arnab Goswami. Really!

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Kudos must be given to Times Now for its drive to expose the little acts of callousness in India. These are problems which are so commonplace that they are overlooked, not just by the media but by the general public as well, perhaps even by NGOs. The death of a five-day-old baby girl in a Jalandhar hospital because her parents could not pay Rs 200 for a life-support system made it to Arnab Goswami’s News Hour. Just as a reference point, the story is on page 11 of the Mumbai edition of The Times of India – and made it there only because of television.

     

    Goswami dignified the death of the girl by cross-examining the doctors – and rejecting all their excuses. He and his guests discussed the callousness of the system, a Supreme Court ruling that bans taking money for life-support from poor people and asked whether the baby would have been treated differently if it was a boy.

     

    Goswami is right when he says that it is these little problems which have to be solved if our society is to be sensitised.

     

    TV continued with its campaign against crimes against women as all channels highlighted the plight of a woman in Kolkata who struggled to file a rape complaint even though she was bleeding profusely and a girl in Bangalore thrown off a train by molesters.

     

    **

     

    Even TV has realised that the Anna Hazare movement has run out of steam and merrily had discussions on it. I would venture to offer “Team Anna” some advice: if it took up the issues of the “little people” it might find greater resonance than its current policy of going after big sharks. In our everyday lives, it is the callous hospital staff, the indifferent police constable who hurt as the most. Let Team Anna follow the path that Goswami has forged for them.

     

    Sudden thought: Can you imagine what would happen if Arnab Goswami and Aamir Khan joined forces? Wow!

     

    **

     

    Of course, one’s love for television cannot go too far. The discussions on the Assam problem have been largely unsatisfying except perhaps for Karan Thapar’s Last Word on CNNIBN, if only because his guests did not have hysterics and screaming fits. It makes a life a little easier if you can understand what everyone is saying. The Jerry Springer version of TV gets tedious after some time.

     

    **

     

    The completely pointless discussions on Narendra Modi’s “hang me if I’m guilty” interview to Urdu weekly Nai Duniya were the other ear-sore. Modi, who likes to be in the news, manages to provoke some TV air time and create the same amount of sound and fury. The same guests every time on every channel on opposite ends of the political drama saying the same things as last time have become a yawn. The highlight on Thursday was apparently Teesta Setalwad walking out of the discussion on Times Now and walking back. This is hearsay evidence because I never saw it but was informed by people who did and by Twitter.

     

    **

     

    Chaos in the social media universe on Thursday incidentally as GTalk and then Twitter collapsed. How on earth did we manage before Twitter everyone asked when it came back. Indeed.

     

    **

     

    The “Greatest Show on Earth” begins. More on that next week. Happy viewing.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: Anna movement reaches its predictable end

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The news was quick to jump on India’s new Union Home minister after a series of bomb blasts hit Pune the day Sushil Kumar Shinde was appointed. In a revealing interview with Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN, Shinde exposed himself as a “family” man and also attributed his political success to his Dalit caste. These are just the kinds of things a new India does not want to hear. Even worse, he then went on to say that he had been an “excellent” power minister – this on the day that North and East India reeled under power blackouts for the second consecutive day.

     

    Fortunately for Shinde and his possible short-comings – and also therefore for the UPA government – escape came from what has been the top news story, especially on television: the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement.

     

    Two days ago, Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami had practically been in tears over the frail but defiant condition of Anna Hazare adviser Arvind Kejriwal. The activist, who is apparently a diabetic, was in a bad way but was refusing to break his fast until all his conditions were met – arrest half the government and so on.

     

    Goswami therefore got into fighting mode as there were indications that the movement was looking for a political solution. Karan Thapar also explored this on his Last Word on CNN-IBN.

     

    By Thursday, it was announced that the anti-corruption movement would now become a political platform. The news was welcomed by all political parties since the fight had moved away from civil society to a battle ground they were all very familiar with.

     

    The media’s relationship with the Anna Hazare movement has been fascinating. TV went overboard last year as it supported the movement wholeheartedly and since most TV journalists are under the age of 11, they must have felt this was bigger than the freedom movement. The print media however remained cautious and in some cases critical. The people of India also get enthusiastic and social media was buzzing with anti-corruption rage. The government helped by bumbling and fumbling in its negotiations. But nothing topped the one lakh people who supported the movement in Delhi last year. The Lokpal bill was passed in the Lok Sabha but did not get past the Rajya Sabha.

     

    Buoyed by its success, the movement went a little overboard in its demands and so TV also started asking difficult questions. No one showed up in Mumbai in December and TV totally turned. All the allegations against people like Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal were discussed. Hazare’s rustic ideas on politics and society became public knowledge. The group’s diverse and contradictory views on the politics, on political parties and ideologies were exposed.

     

    This time’s agitation saw the love coming full circle. TV tried to be supportive but the people were not. The movement’s supporters roughed up journalists for reporting the lack of popular support. The government was unmoved.

     

    The result is that the movement has gone political. Media support, which bolstered the movement so much in its early days, is now no longer assured. An interesting tale of how activists took on the government and enthused some people for a short while has reached a very predictable end. The media, they will have to remember from now on, will never be a pillar of support if it has to be a pillar of democracy.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: The shame of the PR influence on the media

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    It is interesting indeed to see that newspapers have chosen to report on the Maharashtra government’s decision to ban the sale of Mahyco’s Bt cotton seeds in the state but has not gone very far beyond that. In another story on Friday morning, a Parliamentary panel has sought a probe into the current stand-off over the introduction of Bt brinjal in to India.

     

    Criticism of Bt cotton in the media started off by being as expected but soon buckled under the tremendous pressure brought upon it by Mahyco Monsanto Biotech. Earlier in this column we have discussed the “expose” on The Times of India done by P Sainath in the Hindu. The marketing department of the TOI used articles done after a Mahyco Monsanto junket to promote the company, years after they were originally written.

     

    Although there have long been allegations that the forced or over-encouraged use of genetically-engineered cotton seeds have been detrimental to farmers as yields have fallen and land has to be fallow for too long. The initial success of Bt cotton, coupled with the promises made, led to high expectations from farmers and a corresponding high debt burden. This in turn led to most of the suicides by farmers is what most activists and social workers have alleged.

     

    While many such stories appeared initially, the enormous pressure brought upon the media by the company and by the government saw the stories petering out. Monsanto, the American company and Mahyco, the government venture, both employed very persuasive PR to push their case. The Sainath column in Hindu, in fact, went through all the mistakes and misrepresentations in the Times of India Bt cotton junket, point by point. A Parliamentary committee which went to the same areas of Maharashtra a few months later found an area rife with debt and suicides – sometimes quoting the same people who claimed to be happy in the TOI report.

     

    In Friday’s papers, TOI has a single column story while Hindustan Times has a more detailed report.

     

    The shame of the PR influence on the media is not just about glamour or lifestyle stuff, although that is rampant and in some cases institutionalised. But when it comes to corporate pressure, especially from aggressive companies who are willing to use the law and every other avenue to protect themselves from criticism, the media comes up against a formidable opponent. In the case of Monsanto and Mahyco, having initially put up a fight, most of the media seems to have capitulated. Friday’s stories have been carried only because the Maharashtra government has finally accepted that the shift to genetically modified cotton has not been the universal success initially claimed.

     

    Time perhaps for the media to find its teeth again?

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: The news that did not happen on TV

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    All day on Monday all that happened in India was that yoga teacher Baba Ramdev and a few thousand followers continued their protest against corruption and black money in New Delhi. That is, if you watched television. As the day progressed, political leaders attended the protest and gave speeches. That was it. The rest of the news day was in Shavasana – the dead body pose.

     

    Not however, if you read the newspapers on Tuesday. Grains rotting in Gujarat, Haryana minister Gopal Kanda on the run after an employee’s suicide writes a letter saying that a suicide note is not admissible, the latest on the Mumbai violence, especially the provocative doctored videos on the attacks on Muslims in Myanmar, Sharad Pawar given the number 3 slot in the Cabinet behind AK Anthony, a woman researcher allegedly molested on the IIT Mumbai campus by a staff member and the end of the Olympics.

     

    This is just a smattering of the news that did not happen on TV. There is more, though undoubtedly a lot of it is city specific. However, it would have been interesting to know how Delhi reacted to the traffic snarls created by Ramdev’s protests, whether people suffered or not, how many were affected and so on. TV sadly did not oblige.

     

    ***

     

    Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju has been mainly silent after his dramatic ascension to the throne. But now he’s popped up again. Strangely, it is not the media which is his focus. Rather it is West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who he had once lauded for her honesty and determination. Now he is appalled at her authoritarian ways after a farmer was arrested after he questioned the CM at a rally. Banerjee accused the farmer of being a Maoist.

     

    Katju has also stated that Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev’s anti-corruption movements are “empty gas”.

     

    He said: “Nothing is going to happen by Anna or Ramdev’s crusade against corruption”. The former judge said he was not justifying corruption but instead was pointing out that India was going through a “transitional period where there is no moral code”. His prophecy: corruption will continue for 15 years.

     

    Presumably, we will all become moral after that.

     

    * * *

     

    What does one make of anti-corruption activist Kiran Bedi’s statement that the media spends too much time on “small rapes” (she then said she meant rapes by “small” people) instead of corruption? In Bedi lies a lesson for the media. She was pumped up for being India’s first female IPL officers and qualities were attributed to her which she never had. Once she was made into a heroine in the people’s eyes, it became very difficult to dethrone her. As a result of all that hype, she is now in textbooks and has won numerous awards.

     

    Prolonged exposure to her during the Anna Hazare-led movement has however exposed her many short-comings. Now we know that amongst her other faults, she is also dismissive of rape. Some female role model.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: Indian Media’s cheapskate policies lead to shallow coverage

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The Indian media’s biggest weakness has been exposed by the violence in Assam – lack of both intellectual depth and old-style news-gathering. Driven either by the race for rating points or by marketing research drivel imposed by them by corporate offices, journalists have reduced themselves to page makers and anchors. As news rooms have got younger and younger – by design – institutional memory has been sacrificed for cheap and amenable goods.

     

    The result is that not a single mainstream news channel or newspaper has the ability to inform the reader about just what is happening in Assam.

     

    On top of that, we are seeing a return to the right-left Hindu-Muslim polarisation in the media which was last rampant in the 1990s. This means that no conversation can take place without barbs and sideswipes and a complete disregard for fact or indeed for clarity. Last night on Headlines Today, I dare anyone to have gleaned anything substantial from the squabble between Vinod Sharma of Hindustan Times and Tarun Vijay of the BJP over the exodus of people from the North East on fear of retaliatory attacks from Muslims.

     

    I can understand the need to sensationalise news. I also understand that when news moves at a fast pace, you have to move as seamlessly as possible from subject to subject. But our failure is in building up foundations of knowledge and information. We see stories in such lightweight terms that the idea of depth has been forgotten. It is one of our biggest ironies that as the media has become bigger and journalists are paid more, newsgathering has shrunk.

     

    I have yet to read – TV is a complete failure here – any sustained set of articles in any one publication on the Assam situation. The right wing has been screaming about illegal immigration of Bangladeshis into Assam for years but figures do not seem to bear that out. Is it too much to ask that someone shine some light on the issue? The best I have read has been in kafila.org and if newspapers are not careful, the internet is going to walk all over their domain. Given the standard of newspapers sometimes, I don’t even know if that’s a bad thing.

    http://kafila.org/2012/08/16/the-myth-of-the-bangladeshi-and-violence-in-assam-nilim-dutta/

     

    **

     

    Madhu Kishwar’s open letter to Arnab Goswami has created some waves in the social media. She has laid out all the problems which viewers (and as it happens, participants) have with prime time TV discussions. Many people have said what Kishwar has, but few have said it better.

    Open letter to Arnab Goswami by Madhu Kishwar

     

    In the light of that, it was amazing to watch Goswami and his guests on Times Now start frothing at the mouth a couple of weeks ago over the Sikh gurudwara killings in the US state of Wisconsin. I bring this up because I fail to see how hysteria between Goswami and Meenakshi Lekhi of the BJP over why the US called the killings an act of domestic terrorism and not a hate crime will make any substantial difference to the American legal process. Goswami I understand is on his peculiar jingoistic mission of catapulting India to the leader of the Universe status. But Lekhi is supposed to be a lawyer. From reading Kishwar’s piece you understand – the more you agree with the anchor, no matter how absurd his position – the better your chances of being called back as a guest.

     

    Last night on Times Now, Goswami wanted to know why the persons who spread the rumours about people from the North East being attacked and the person who made a provocative speech in Mumbai last week had not been arrested yet. He provided an example of China, that beacon of justice and fair play, to prove his point. This is about as absurd as it gets.

     

    For an illuminating, if unpleasant for the right wing, comment on Mumbai’s violence after some Muslim organisations protested the killings of Muslims in Assam and Myanmar, here’s Jyoti Punwani in the Hindu

    http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3772309.ece?homepage=true

     

  • The longer you watch TV news in India on a regular basis, the greater the likelihood of Alcoholics Anonymous becoming a distinct possibility, notes Ranjona Banerji, while making a confession that she’s missing Manu Singhvi very much 🙂

    Ranjona Banerji: Enough of serial debaters & screamers on news channels

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    They maybe very nice people when they’re at home but there are some people whom I never want to see on television again. Well, preferably never again but if that is not possible then at least after a very long time. Here are their names, in no particular order: Manish Tiwari, Chandan Mitra, Swapan Dasgupta, Meenakshi Lekhi, Kamal Farooqui, Mohammed Owaisi, Suhel Seth, Renuka Choudhary, Mukul Oza, Jainarayan Vyas, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Vinod Sharma, Vinod Mehta, Mohandas Pai, Shobhaa De… News channels need to find a whole new list of serial debaters and screamers to appear on their channels every night to give the viewing public a break from this lot. I have nothing against some of these people and personally find some of them unbearable but I am tired of watching all of them.

     

    Of course, there is possibly a severe shortage of argumentative Indians in India, in which case these TV channels can get together and organise a training school for political spokespersons who are stuck in a groove and for societal leaders (yes, I know the jargon!) who have become a little jaded with all this constant TV exposure. A special refresher is needed for journalists who cannot decide if they are indeed journalists or spokespersons for political parties.

     

    Also, news channels need to make their guests sign a full disclosure about how many other TV channels they plan to visit on the same day. It can be very disturbing for viewers to see the same guest saying different things wearing a different shirt on different channels at exactly the same time. This can lead to moments of sheer terror at the tricks your mind is playing on you. It usually happens to me when I quickly hit the remote to get away from a certain screamer only to find him or her on the next news channels.

     

    A running scroll at the bottom of the screen could warn us: “Viewers are informed that guest number so-and-so is also currently appearing on all our rival channels and therefore they do not need to rush and join Alcoholics Anonymous immediately.”

     

    I do suspect however that the longer you watch TV news in India on a regular basis, the greater the likelihood of Alcoholics Anonymous becoming a distinct possibility.
    I forgot to mention, the warning scroll at the bottom of the screen needs to have at least three grammatical errors for it to look like legitimate journalism or viewers may well confuse it with an ad.

     

    I have to admit that the one person I really miss is Abhishek Manu Singhvi. His sneering arrogance and amazing felicity with the language made him very watchable. Why his sex life ended his television time I have not yet understood.

     

    **

     

    TV news therefore continued in its own inevitable fashion last week. The bigger excitement was in the social media as the government of India, which has never really understood freedom of expression in 65 years, tried to block websites, twitter, Facebook and so on.

     

    That this is a self-defeating exercise has not yet been understood.

     

    **

     

    Meanwhile Barkha Dutt, once India’s star TV anchor but now I’m not so sure, started a twit-fight by suggesting that the problem with twitter is that it is boring and predictable and full of agenda-pushers, stalkers, loser, lurkers and other such characters. I peeked into her profile (no, I am not a follower) and found that while she had thousands of followers, she followed only 160 people. No wonder twitter is boring for her. My advice is simple: follow more people and get to know more points of view than those of the stalkers, losers and lurkers who follow you!

     

    Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. The views expressed here are her own

     

  • Ranjona Banerji on the Supreme Court indictment of the coverage by news channels

    Ranjona Banerji: Was TV news reckless in covering 26/11?

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    On Wednesday evening, after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist caught in the November 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai, I received a tweet saying that no TV panel discussions would ever be held on the way the court indicted TV channels for their “reckless” coverage.

     

    Perhaps they will and perhaps they won’t. Certainly newspapers have reported on the apex court’s comments.

     

    “The shots and visuals that were shown live by TV channels could have been shown after all the terrorists were neutralised and all the security operations were over. But in that case, the TV programmes would not have had the same shrill, scintillating and chilling effect and would not have shot up the TRP ratings of the channels,” said the two-judge bench of Justices Aftab Alam and CK Prasad.

     

    There was much discussion during and after the attacks about the sensational coverage of the attacks by TV channels and whether or not security had been jeopardised. There now seems to be evidence – conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan – that certainly the terrorists knew what was going on because of the TV coverage.

     

    There was also the anger against NDTV for revealing the hotel room of a witness on live TV during an excited conversation. This was more fuel to a latent anger against NDTV and its celebrity anchor Barkha Dutt which started during the Kargil War over the perhaps injudicious use of a satellite phone.

     

    However, as any journalist knows covering a live event is not easy. There are instant decisions to be made under very stressful circumstances. Some mistakes are inevitable. This is not an excuse: rather it is a way to explain why mistakes will happen. Times Now, for instance, has to be commended for the way in which it decided not to give away important positions or reveal the status of those still trapped inside the two hotels and Nariman House. It was the coverage of this event which catapulted Times Now to the status it now has. Editor Arnab Goswami resisted the temptation to jump into the fray himself — unlike Dutt of NDTV and Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN who turned themselves into field reporters – and instead behaved like an editor by staying in the newsroom and directed his people.

     

    But the phenomenon of editors wanting to grab plum reporting assignments is a critique for another time.

     

    It also has to be pointed out that the print media not only has a better system of checks, balances and filters than TV but also that print editors usually get their celebrity status by pontificating in opinion pieces rather than stealing the thunder from their reporters. Print also has the time to sort out how a breaking event has to be presented.
    Unfortunately for Indian TV news, the notion of how an “editor” functions has still not penetrated into its functioning. There is too much breathless excitement and immaturity in the way events are covered. And four years ago, a vicious, ruthless and audacious terrorist attack in India’s commercial capital was one such event. Rather than indict the medium of television news itself, it might be a better idea to punish those particular channels which compromised national security. But it is also time for Indian news channels to adopt some more practical journalistic systems so that this argument does not come up again and again.

     

    Even if a live event is being covered, there has to be time for considered judgment about what can be shown and what cannot: a little more editorial discretion and a little less immature hysteria. Was it necessary, for instance, for Headlines Today to show godman Asaram Bapu’s helicopter crashing on a continuous loop for five minutes?
    But after all the indictments and criticism, this has to be said. TV news gave India the chance to see what was happening and the extent of Pakistan’s assault on India. We also Kasab creeping past VT station and that image is one of the many which ensured his sentencing. For this, we have to thank the medium. It made compelling viewing and I for one watched it for almost three days running.

     

    Can TV news get better? Certainly. Does it have to be damned unequivocally? Certainly not.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji tracks the news (and non-news) on TV, in the papers and cyberspace

    Ranjona Banerji: Why focus on Asaram Bapu’s copter crash?

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    On the one hand, TV did as good a job as it could in its reporting on the twin verdicts on Wednesday – confirmation of terrorists Ajmal Kasab’s death sentence and 32 people, including a former minister and prominent Bajrang Dal leader, found guilty in the Naroda Patiya massacre during the Gujarat riots.

     

    However, being TV, they are easily distracted. The continued focus on the CAG report and coal allocations is understandable as is the disruption of Parliament by the BJP. But was it necessary to focus quite so much on Asaram Bapu’s helicopter crash considering injuries were minor? For some reason, the acquittal by the Supreme Court of two suspects in the November 2008 terror case was overlooked by TV. Kasab’s guilt was self-evident – he was seen by millions on TV and captured on film by newspaper photographers. But the other two were caught later by the Mumbai police and have been acquitted by three courts for insufficient evidence. The first time they were acquitted, the inefficiency of the Mumbai police was pointed to by former IPS officer and now activist lawyer YP Singh to a young anchor on NDTV, she was quite upset. She asked shocked, “How can you say that? They work so hard?” It was Singh’s turn to be shocked as he was stunned into silence.

     

    **

     

    By Thursday, the news cycle for television had changed. Karan Thapar on The Last Word on CNN-IBN was worried about whether NAM was still relevant and Sagorika Ghose also on CNN-IBN was asking about education and sports after St Stephen’s College in Delhi did not allow India’s Under-19 cricket captain Unmukt Chand to sit for his exams.
    But the widest search for a subject to save India from itself came from Arnab Goswami of Times Now. He wanted to know why some MLAs from the Karnataka Assembly were travelling abroad on study tours when Karnataka was in a drought situation. The first rule of responsible journalism: first report extensively and comprehensively on the drought situation. After that, look for sensational subjects to shore up your viewership.

     

    **

     

    Newspapers remained more circumspect and traditional and they reported on the two judgments, analysed them and wrote editorials. Most slammed the Modi government in Gujarat, all accepted that the Kasab verdict was inevitable and there was comprehensive explanation over death row procedures. Some debate over capital punishment ensued as well. Nothing untoward or unusual in the papers.

     

    **

     

    However it was unusual that television did not go to town on Narendra Modi’s comments that Gujarat’s malnutrition figures are high because beauty-conscious girls don’t eat enough. Now that would have been an exciting debate to watch on Times Now. Really, India wants to know.