Category: RANJONA BANERJI

By Ranjona Banerji

 

As journalists, we are expected to develop some sort of responsibility about our larger role in society. This can occasionally go beyond the spicy story and the exciting scoop. But now twice in a short span, we have seen TV going overboard over rather dangerous subjects. The first was the extreme jingoism displayed over skirmishes at the LOC between India and Pakistan. I quote from an edit page piece by Arun Prakash, former navy chief, in Friday’s Times of India: “If the incipient Indo-Pak crisis of the past fortnight had any lesson to convey, it was that the road to perdition is lined with shrill, hysterical TV anchors, bloodthirsty politicians and a seemingly somnolent national security establishment.”

 

It is a damning indictment of the TV media and no less true for all that. And now, India and Pakistan having “stepped back from the brink” to quote Prakash, we have TV jumping into the treacherous waters of Hindu-Muslim relations. By overplaying and then seeking out endless reactions to Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde’s remarks about terror camps and the RSS and BJP, TV anchors are attacking a fault line that has in the past created massive disruptions in Indian society.

 

It is all very well that some TV anchors became famous by covering wars and others became famous by covering riots but the country can hardly be held ransom to these career ambitions. A quick look at how newspapers have treated Shinde’s remarks – and the BJP’s reactions – and you get a clear indication of how a more mature, experienced mind functions. This is not a game.

 

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Headlines Today has decided to look ahead to the next general elections and make its own forecasts through opinion polls. This faith in election forecasting is indeed endearing – most got it wrong at the recent Gujarat assembly elections for instance. The general elections are due somewhere in mid-2014. Anything is possible in the interim and it is amazing to see that a media house puts its faith in a survey done now.

 

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I would have thought – foolishly as it turns out – that the Justice Verma committee report on rape laws would have got better play in the media. Reports on the report were scattered across pages making negotiation a little difficult without a GPS tracking device. Analysis has also been insufficient – so far – although The Indian Express has an edit page piece by Pratiksha Baxi which does shed some light:

 

Perhaps, people are still reading through the report and trying to understand it?

 

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I met some second-year students of a prestigious Mumbai college yesterday, studying the BMM course. I was asked why when I started my career I had opted to be a sub-editor when I could have been a journalist. This question I confess stumped me for a good five minutes. I tried to explain that everyone who works in the editorial section of a journal is a journalist (I’m guessing the same applies to news channels!) but all I got was a blank stare. A journalist, from what I now understand, is a reporter. That’s it. So let that be a lesson to all of you swanking around behaving like journalists when in fact, you are nothing.

 

A few more questions and I discover where they come from: the bulk of their faculty are their own ex-students, with little or no experience. As long as HR departments believe that only people who do these bogus courses are worth hiring, senior journalists (reporters, sub-editors all) must take a greater interest in media courses across the country. No?

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

True confession: I have avoided watching television news for the past week. The result: grey hair count has come down, wrinkles have reduced and I sleep better at night. Well, all right, that’s the kind of hyperbole I normally accuse TV anchors of, but still. It has been some kind of an improvement on my life. On Monday night, I decided to try again. I got Karan Thapar and guests discussing Ashis Nandy and his “controversial” statement on caste and corruption on CNN-IBN. I got Arnab Goswami also discussing this controversial statement on Times Now and then I got Rajdeep Sardesai also discussing this on CNN-IBN. There was something else on Headlines Today by which time I was so confused by so many of the same people saying the same or different things on so many channels that I gave up.

 

The problem is not just the anchors, it’s also their guests. The BJP people always look like they suffer from severe dyspepsia and 10 bottles of Digene have not helped. The Congress people look like they have advanced cases of extreme arrogance and are too superior to even be part of a discussion. The BSP people look puzzled that they’re actually there (it’s usually the same person, I admit). The SP person is unsure whether this TV is a good invention or not. The Shiv Sena chap is always smiling except when he has to speak – then, he’s angry. Most of them are lawyers, which makes you wonder… None of them has ever been taught that it is not polite to interrupt and shout all the time when someone else is talking. This makes you wonder only if you have spent all of the 63 years since we got that Constitution under a giant boulder.

 

Rarely, has anything been achieved by these debates. The only person who made sense through the whole Nandy fight was Yogendra Yadav. I suppose though he is now a politician too, since he’s part of the Aam Aadmi Party and will soon get his own look for TV debates. Sigh.

 

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The best part of the television I did watch last week was Kunal Vijaykar playing a desolate Nitin Gadkari on The Week That Wasn’t. A fine piece of acting! Also, a fascinating discussion on CNN about “catfishing” – people who get fooled into online relationships with invented online personas.

 

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Meanwhile, kudos to Mid-Day for its story on vegetables grown in gutters in Mumbai and to Hindustan Times for its coverage of the Jaipur Literary Festival, minus too much aw-ing and ah-ing. The Times of India had a round up piece on the festival with two bylines but read like a PR press release.

 

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Having ripped into ESPN-Star last week over coverage of the Australian Open, a slight scheduling course correction was visible and the final was telecast on EPSN despite the last ODI between England and India and the Ranji final being on the same day. Indian tennis fans are grateful and would be even happier if we weren’t taken for granted so easily in the future… Ah well.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

Narendra Modi gave a speech at a Delhi college and half of India’s TV channels wondered if it was time to anoint him as India’s new prime minister. The Gujarat chief minister has not yet been declared as a PM candidate by either the Bharatiya Janata Party or the National Democratic Alliance. With the general elections due around mid-2014, does this mean we are we going to be subjected to a year and a half of the same discussion on TV? Should Modi be the PM candidate? What will happen if Modi becomes the PM candidate? Will the Janata Dal (United) stay within the NDA? What does Nitish Kumar think and so an ad nauseum.

 

Not that this isn’t an important subject. The problem is that so far not only is Modi’s ascension just speculation, there is a very real fear that we may be discussing nothing else for the next few months. BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad had a tough time on Times Now standing up for his party reserving the right to decide on its own prime ministerial candidate within its own time frame. If the onslaught of the nation’s right to know from Arnab Goswami wasn’t enough, Prasad then decided to take on veteran journalist Kumar Ketkar as well, for being a BJP detractor.
It will be interesting to see whether new channels will telecast all speeches made by chief ministers in the national capital from now on, in case any of them feel they deserve to be prime minister…

 

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Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju has endeared himself to owners and managements of all media houses by bringing up the problem of governments using advertisements as a form of blackmail/coercion. Katju in his inimitable style wants some legal action against governments who behave like this. Owners, managers and editors all concur that governments regularly behave like this, particularly state governments which are more vindictive than the Centre. Some also complained that private companies can be as nasty as the government. Many pointed out that the press – print and television – are pillars of democracy and has to be supported. The additional problem of newspapers and magazines being sold for much less than production cost was also mentioned.

 

It is indeed commendable that so many owners are so concerned about the importance of the press and the role it plays as a vital part of a democracy. These protestations would have been slightly more believable if owners and managements had not resorted to dubious and destructive practices like “paid news” and Medianet and its variations. Much of the degradations of the media today have come from within the media itself and unfortunately, senior journalists have not been strong enough to withstand owner/management pressure.

 

As far as private companies and their advertising choices are concerned it is frankly hilarious that managements are complaining about advertisements being withheld because of negative stories which are well within journalistic rights. I know of no management which has supported a journalist doing a story which might hurt advertising. In fact, enormous pressure is put on senior editors whenever management gets to hear about such an impending story. This breast-beating to Mr Katju is nothing short of hypocrisy.

 

The Press Council chairman may do well to take a closer look at how media houses function and speak to more journalists if he really wants to clean up the system. He can start with “paid news”. I put the term in inverted commas in the desperate hope that it has not yet become a legitimate part of the lexicon.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

TV host and columnist Karan Thapar very kindly articulated in his Sunday column in the Hindustan Times what many of us have been saying for a while now: TV debates in India have reached rock bottom. Well, welcome to Irony Central. Because while Thapar was writing about what passed for debate after sociologist Ashis Nandy’s comments about lower caste corruption at the Jaipur Literary Festival last month, TV debate delved deeper than rock bottom when it came to the execution of Afzal Guru. (http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/ColumnsKaranThapar/TV-a-Mea-Culpa/Article1-1009279.aspx)

 

Given that we have to take any subject and then imagine all the possible, probable and delusionary scenarios around it, Guru’s hanging gave us in the media a field day. First, we had to try and create a Bharatiya Janata Party versus the rest slugfest. Not satisfied with that, we then had to make it a this-terrorist-versus-that-terrorist yelling match. When that did not create enough fireworks, we had to jump into why did the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir do what he did, say what he did and more.

 

The word “should” now dominates our TV screens. It is flashed at us thousands of times a day: Should the government do this, shouldn’t the government do that, should he had said this, shouldn’t she have said that: the points where the news itself is actually shared or discussed has almost vanished. Instead, we are confronted with a barrage of judgmental possibilities.

 

Unfortunately, none of these postures leads to any meaningful conversation or insights. Everyone on TV it seems wants to score cheap points off the other and all discourse is either limited to one-upmanship or attack. If any of these people who invade our homes every night and assault our senses were part of a school debate, they would be summarily dismissed the minute they opened their mouths.

 

There are undoubtedly questions to be asked about Guru’s hanging, about the death penalty, about those who wait on death row, about legal aid, about others accused of terrorist acts, about political support for some of the accused, about the complicated politics of India, about the bloodthirsty nature of our populace – these are only some of them. But you would not have found an iota of sense from TV.

 

Why Indian news TV does not occasionally abandon its love for traditional Indian theatre forms like tamasha and jatra and try one-on-one interviews with experts to illuminate an issue is puzzling. (To be fair, Karan Thapar does.) Is the only reason for these debates to create a spectacle or is there some journalistic purpose still discernible to anyone? It is certainly not apparent to me.

 

Meanwhile, for those inclined here is a debate carried in The Hindu over Guru’s hanging. First do read the piece by author Arundhuti Roy and then a response by journalist Praveen Swami.

 

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/a-perfect-day-for-democracy/article4397705.ece

 

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-vanity-of-1312-truthtelling/article4400821.ece

 

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I will not repeat that to make sense of any issue you have to read a newspaper… all right, I have just repeated it and it remains true.

 

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To further illustrate the point, on Monday night, CNNIBN had an excellent exclusive story about the CBI accusing its own prosecutor in the 2G spectrum case of colluding with an accused. In an interview with the CBI director Ranjit Sinha, editor Rajdeep Sardesai kept on with the same line of questioning: will you do this and will you do that. Why not ask the director about corporate corruption, about the quality of prosecutors, about the difficulty of the 2G case. By focusing on a possible result at all times and to the exclusion of everything else, we lose out on the nuances.

 

I for one refuse to believe that all Indians are too dumb to understand anything but the most obvious and cannot comprehend anything that it is not presented in a high-pitched hysterical manner.

 

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And while we’re on this 2G case, perhaps it is time for the media to revisit the Radia tapes and assess whether enough has been done to safeguard our credibility. Sorry, excuse me while I die laughing.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

If you are tired of the “I’ll be the judge, I’ll be the jury, pronounce you guilty and chop off your head” trials held in TV studios every night, try reading The Indian Express to get a deeper and wider understanding of the Agusta Westland helicopter deal and the Italian investigations into Finmeccanica. Although Times Now has been taking credit for this story, it does appear as if Indian Express has done (and had been doing) the bulk of the work.

 

TV news channels seem now incapable of acting like journalists and have become trapped in their own images as it were. The details of this deal and its wrongdoings are still being revealed – the Italians have not named any Indians apart from former air chief marshal SP Tyagi and his cousins. Therefore, Indian journalists might consider some further investigations. The TV approach of calling sundry politicians who know nothing about the details of the deal and then cross-examining them maybe a good ego massage but it serves very little journalistic purpose. At least, we need not have the incredible sight of political gadfly Subramaniam Swamy directing CNNIBN editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai on how to conduct this investigation.

 

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An intriguing piece of news was hidden somewhere on the inside pages of the Times of India’s Mumbai edition. The Information and Broadcasting ministry is considering cancelling the licences of newspapers/journals who are involved in “paid news”. This comes after the Election Commission has taken action against politicians involved in bribing newspapers, journals and news channels (is there a more polite way of saying this?) to get favourable pre-election coverage. However, even at that time, questions were raised about why the media houses were allowed to get away with it.

 

What will media houses make of this? Can the loss of the right to conduct business deter owners and managements from further perverting their “products”? Is the fear of government action the only way to force the press to follow its own ethical code? Or will we now see a spate of stories targeting the I&B ministry and the very amusing spectacle of various CEOs of media houses attempting to justify their dubious practices in long-winded and badly written edit page articles?

 

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Is it just me or was this Valentine’s Day one of the least silly we’ve had in recent times? There was the usual quota of love-no love stories, but nothing seemed extraordinarily over-the-top. A little more humour and fun might have been interesting. Judging from the number of jokes made by Indians on twitter, the traditional newspaper idea that no one reads humour columns in India is ready to be challenged. Rohan Joshi for one does a very good job at making us laugh in Mid-Day on Saturdays and The Week That Wasn’t has tickled ye old funny bone for eight years on CNNIBN now. Bring it on, I say!

 

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This is a slight departure from the serious and grey-haired subject of the woes of journalism. But can we have better sub-titles and less censoring of English programmes on TV? The number of words which are bleeped out have crossed all bounds of sense and are worthy of a separate programme on Comedy Central – which by the way is the worst culprit. For the morally clean-minded: vulgarity alert. You cannot hear the words “penis” or “vagina”. That is one thing. But you cannot even hear the word “booby-trap” which has nothing to do about “boobs” or breasts. I shudder to think what goes through their minds when they come across a character named “Dick” or someone feels a “prick” from a rose bush… More seriously, what happens when characters discuss breast or testicular cancer?

 

With that happy thought, I leave you for the week.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju is a man who neither minces his words nor is he frightened of airing his many opinions. He started off his tenure as PCI chairman by stating most journalists neither knew what they were talking about nor how to go about their jobs. He threatened to file several cases against all kinds of transgressors in the Indian system. He claimed that 90 per cent of Indians were idiots. And now he has called the bluff on the claims of development made by the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat.

 

For some reason, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Jaitley had been very upset by Katju’s article published in The Hindu. He immediately wrote a counter article for the website rediff.com demanding Katju’s resignation as PCI, calling him pro-Congress (in BJP speak that is apparently akin to questioning someone’s parenthood). Katju responded by saying that Jaitley should resign from politics. Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the BJP likened Katju to a “vagabond” while Digvijay Singh of the Congress questioned whether Jaitley was defending Modi because he owed him is Rajya Sabha seat.

 

This low calibre back and forth looks like ideal journalistic cannon fodder but we seem to have become even more faux earnest and full of ourselves than normal and perhaps take politicians too seriously…

 

Of course, the issue of whether Katju has the right to freedom of speech has been forgotten in this whole fracas. A highly opinionated man is surely entitled to his own opinions? He might need to take this up somewhere…

 

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Talking about freedom of expression, the curious case of the Gwalior court directing the Department of Telecom to block 73 URLs mentioning IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri has demonstrated once again how India’s cyber laws infringe on this basic right. The University Grants Commission has once again posted on its website that IIPM is not authorised to award degrees says a story in Tuesday’s Economic Times. The UGC was one of the URLs blocked by DoT.

 

The connection between IIPM and various media houses is hardly news and it is one of the ways in which this institution, which has had many questions raised against it, has managed to survive and thrive. All those journalists who have done investigations into the promises made by IIPM have been targeted by the group, which has used its media clout to get favourable publicity in spite of its lack of recognition by the UGC. The UGC in its July 2012 notice had warned students that the “institution was not recognised by the higher education regulator and not authorised to award degrees” to quote The Economic Times.

 

Even if Chaudhuri is fighting defamation charges, the UGC information is surely vital to prospective students? It is interesting that while our TV channels are chewing their intestines every night over the Agusta-Westland helicopter deal, we have not seen Chaudhuri being hung, drawn and quartered on some TV channel… The power of advertising?

 

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As far as the Agusta-Westland deal is concerned, instead doing hard core investigative journalism, our TV studios have turned into trial courts and giant advisory bodies where celebrity news anchors tell everyone else what to do and what questions to ask. So far, however, no one really seems to be following their thundering instructions.

 

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Kudos to Mumbai Mirror’s Sunday edition for its cover story on the drought in Maharashtra, which has not got much newspaper play in the city. We need to be reminded from time to time that there’s an India beyond malls and anti-aging creams…

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

A bare few hours after the serial blasts happened in Hyderabad our news channels were on their usual inquisitorial quest for answers to questions only they wanted answered. A person who does not spend his or her life in front of a TV screen would have had little clue about what had happened but would know that the chief minister has visited (why, though if he hadn’t the question would have been why not), that the Union home ministry had sent indications (why had no one acted), that America had managed to pre-empt terror attacks (why can’t we) and was it the Lashkar-e-Taiba or Indian Mujahideen or a response to the hanging of Afzal Guru or a reaction to Union Home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde’s comment about the RSS and BJP holding terror camps.

 

Yes, you might be wondering: what happened and in which part of Hyderabad, how many people died and how many were injured. For this you would have to read the scrolls running at the bottom of your TV screens since the Intifada was in full flow. I must give credit to Headlines Today for putting a Google map up on screen but since they didn’t contextualise the area – Dilsukhnagar – one was none the wiser.

 

By the time the newspapers arrived on Friday morning, none of Quasimodo’s questions were answered and instead we got the details of what had happened. When journalists are taught about the Five W’s and an H, no one tells them that ‘Why’ is the only question to be asked. Or maybe they do. Judging from what passes for instruction in journalism schools in India…

 

Of course, the only newspaper which could not answer the right questions was The Times of India’s Mumbai edition. Because it came covered in glossy orange selling something or the other and a tiny legend somewhere told you that, “This particular edition had to be released at 10 pm, which is much earlier than usual, for unavoidable reasons. For the latest news, please go to…”

 

The “unavoidable reasons” were clearly the money which was to be made and perhaps newspapers should just tell its readers the truth: “We have sacrificed the news today because so-and-so advertiser has come up with this daft idea and as a result we have had to change our printing and distributing schedules”. As to who the advertiser in this case was I cannot tell you as I threw the glossy orange paper aside and didn’t bother to look at the name and could not be bothered to pick it up again. Did anyone else pay attention and rush out and buy the product or service or whatever?

 

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There have been some complaints that the Indian media has not picked up on the Shahbagh protests in Dhaka. Many of these complaints are in the Indian media itself, but in the opinion sections. The Shahbagh protests are being compared to the Arab Spring and refer to the anger amongst young people that those who sided with Pakistan in the Bangladesh movement for freedom are not being sufficiently punished, amongst other things. The murder of one of the main organisers of the movement, a prominent blogger, has also angered lakhs of people.

 

Once again, the impact of social media cannot be underestimated. As for the Indian media, it is so obsessed with its own ideas that sometimes it forgets to look outside the window. Or maybe the windows are all covered in some glossy colourful newsprint provided by advertisers.

 

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My careful (or willy-nilly) assessment of the weather bulletins on BBC World has led me to this conclusion: the weather people at BBC World are bored sick of the weather, which to them was usually a search for wherever the sun was shining. So now they package weather news into peppy little nuggets of holiday information. This is the right time to go skiing in Austria, sun-worshipping in “Ibitha” and so on. Meanwhile, there may be hurricanes, typhoons, murderous snow storms, droughts and anything else happening, but who cares? Just pack your skis and head for Innsbruck.

 

Ranjona Banerji can be followed on twitter at @ranjona