MxMIndia

Category: RANJONA BANERJI

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

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    Freaking News: SP goes UP, Times Now went down

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    What a mouth-watering cornucopia of choice, you think, as you settle down to watch the election results unfolding at 8 am on Tuesday morning, what with so many TV channels to choose from. In a couple of hours of course, you’re weeping at the cacophony, the grand, sweeping statements and the sheer confusion caused by so many channels.

     

    For once, the loser is perhaps Times Now. The channel, which so often knows what India wants to know, appears to have overplayed its hand. Its bizarre desire to clock 100 hours of election coverage meant that it started long before the results day and created unnecessary boredom for the viewer. Plus an enormous range of “guests” some of whom were colour-coordinated (Vinod Mehta and Meghnad Desai on Monday night and Meghnad Desai and Neerja Chowdhury on Tuesday morning) and too much on-screen graphic hysteria made Times Now distracting and the remote more appealing.

     

    CNNIBN made large generalisations even as early trends were being reported and then hopped back and forth to little avail. If Times Now had too much, CNNIBN did not have enough.

     

    In the English news segment, the battle seemed to be between NDTV and Headlines Today. NDTV had Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwalla, the old and trusted team, bolstered by words of wisdom from Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta. Headlines Today had Mani Shankar Aiyar to add his considerable wit to the mix apart from a very eager energetic Rahul Kanwal.

     

    I have to be honest here – I preferred NDTV until Barkha Dutt arrived, which is when I switched to Headlines Today – which by the way also claimed that only its exit polls were correct (more on that in a bit).

     

    Of the Hindi channels, Aaj Tak was professional and easy to watch – although they all have a better ground presence in terms of reporters than the English channels. The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha channels both had serious debates and less fluff than all the others combined.

     

    Mid-morning, the confusion between the channels reached its climax as each of them showed different trends, some almost at odds with each other. At which point, I switched everything off and went for a walk!

     

    **

     

    It’s now 12.55 pm and we have no results yet but some very strong trends. Most exit polls had decided that the Samajwadi Party would win UP, but the feeling was for a hung assembly where the permutations and alliances would be paramount. Right now, it seems like a clear win for the SP. The BJP has not done as well as it must have expected and nor has the Congress – but it has done better than before. Most channels have been debating this “failure” of Rahul Gandhi in UP although the numbers show a Congress gain.

     

    Punjab was tagged as a clear Congress win but instead the Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP alliance has retained power – although the BJP’s losses have been the Congress’s gains.Uttarakhand is still too close to call – but again, it was seen as a Congress win.

     

    Manipur has gone to the Congress – as expected and Goa seems to be heading to the BJP, again as expected.

     

    **

     

    Which means once more, the Indian voter has done her own thing and flummoxed everyone.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    Freaking News: It’s business as usual after the election euphoria

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Of course the media was to blame for the Bahujan Samaj Party’s loss in UP’s assembly elections. Sure, the Samajwadi Party, Congress and BJP were also involved but the media certainly played a role in the rout of Mayawati. Thankfully – perhaps – the former chief minister of UP did not blame the people, as Prakash Karat, chief dictator of the CPM did, after the Left managed to lose West Bengal to Mamata Banerjee.

     

    After the results were declared, TV land went into a sort of decline. Having expended this enormous amount of energy on getting the results out to the people in the usual frenzied fashion, the day after was a probably inevitable anti-climax. The arrival of Holi did not help either, because everyone went into holiday mood which for most TV channels means showing a stream of Hindi film songs (no point asking) and other fillers.

     

    Life was not different for newspapers as Holi meant holidays on different days across India. Was this a conspiracy by the Election Commission? If I were Mayawati or Salman Khurshid, I would certainly think so.

     

    The Times of India’s early edition for Dehra Dun on March 7 (more on the perils of being stuck with a mofussil edition coming soon) headlined the results as ‘UP has spoken, no Rahul Maya’, with the ‘sp’ of spoken in red. Other puns were also in evidence (Sonrise for Akhilesh and Bad Heir Day for Rahul Gandhi). The Hindustan Times went for ‘Akhilesh Pradesh’, DNA Mumbai had a bit of fun with ‘Rahul knocked down by cycle’.

     

    * * *

     

    Newspaper editorials summed up the results quite cogently. The Hindu argued that just depending on anti-incumbency isn’t enough; parties have to make more effort that expecting the other person to lose. The Times of India emphasised the fact that the Indian voter knows when someone is trying to take them for a ride and rather than traditional promises, deliverance and governance are the keys. Several commentators also pointed out that corruption at the Centre had an impact on local polls, which is bad news for the UPA and Anna Hazare, his team and Baba Ramdev had a little chuckle here. No one missed the fact that the regional parties had trumped the big two in UP either. The forthcoming perils for the UPA and the BJP have both been underlined.

     

    As expected, it takes print to make sense of anything and TV would do well to develop some expertise and analytical skills of its own.

     

    * * *

     

    By the time the euphoria died down, it was business as usual and the Samajwadi Party was up to its usual tricks which TV jumped on with alacrity – a young boy killed, journalists under siege, houses burnt. An IPS officer was killed in Madhya Pradesh, apparently by the mining mafia, several people in Mumbai were hospitalised by poisonous Holi colours and BS Yeddurappa wants his job back!

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    [MJR] Grrrrr! Why do people speak so much on News TV?

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The best news programme in India has to be The Week That Wasn’t on CNN-IBN. Since it steadfastly refuses to save India and the world and shamelessly makes fun of everyone, it fails miserably on the high-pitched hysteria count. But it wins on all the others. And it makes you wish that the programme had more than a weekly format because if you spend three evenings running watching our other worthies, it is enough to make you scale to the top of a tall building without a safety harness.

     

    After his marathon election extravaganza, I have found Arnab Goswami and his channel a dead bore. Also, they spend too much time discussing the minutiae of the Indian cricket board’s digestive processes. Plus, when they do, Boria Mazumdar comes on air and this disrupts my digestive processes. So I tried to give a fair hearing to NDTV, Headlines Today and CNN-IBN (am currently in Tata Sky land which does not carry Newsx).

     

    Rajdeep Sardesai on Monday night went on and on about the UPA government collapsing, a third front forming and mid-term elections approaching. None of his guests – Devesh Thakur of the JD (U), Pinaki Mishra of the BJD and Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress agreed with him. Sardesai laboured the point and the rest pooh-poohed him. I fail to see the point of such a programme. Then Sardesai announced that Chandan Mitra was arriving on the show so I quickly switched to NDTV. And to my horror, there was Chandan Mitra on NDTV. This was too much to handle and I tried to look for a tall building (with no safety harness) but there aren’t too many in Dehra Dun where I am now.

     

    On NDTV just before the horror of the spectacle of Chandan Mitra, Sonia Varma had Arvind Kejriwal on the show. He said that the results of the Uttar Pradesh government, where the Samajwadi Party effectively trounced the BSP, reflected the anger of the people against the Congress Party. Varma, if she had false teeth, would have swallowed them. Serves her right for inviting a member of Team Anna to start broadcasting their bizarre logic all over again.

     

    Headlines Today was on a trip which I couldn’t understand, a mixture of cricket and the government falling, but none of them cohesively.

     

    On NDTV Profit, Srinivasan Jain attempted to interview Aditya Ghosh, president of Indigo airlines, about why they were more profitable than the others and what about Kingfisher. However Jain spoke so much that Ghosh’s views got lost in a series of “having said thats”.

     

    Still on NDTV, Prannoy Roy had a panel discussion with several industrial worthies at a Mumbai college. Rahul Bajaj spoke so much that no one else had a chance, so that was that.

     

    The good news was that someone actually found the world-famous Bollywood Super Star Nupur Mehta who is now going to sue The Sunday Times (phoren) for calling her a “honey trap” used by bookies to lure cricketers into cheating. But no one told me whether it was just because her picture was used or because she really was the honey trap. Anyway, I had never heard of her before and any minute now my ignorance will be exposed because she is the star of Ra One, The Robot, Dirty Picture and more. No?

     

    Finally, I took refuge in Rajya Sabha TV which was so serious and sober that I felt that I had entered a parallel universe which completely disoriented me, so I went back to watching tennis.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    Budget 2012: Ranjona Banerji on how TV Channels fared with their Budget specials

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Soon after India liberalised her economy, the late great Nani Palkhiwala, whose budget analysis speech would fill up Brabourne stadium, decided that there was no longer any need to discuss the budget. Yet in India, it is still a grand tamasha event and even more so, with the massive explosion of television. Before the TV days the best we had to contend with were the massive graphics on the front page of The Economic Times, with the “fin min” portrayed as some kind of super hero or failing that, a comic character.

     

    (By the way, thank god they don’t call them fin mins any more or maybe Pranab Mukherjee threatened dire consequences.)

     

    From early on Friday morning, all the channels were in a high state of excitement as they discussed what the budget could be, what they wanted it to be and so on. Despite the Economic Survey of the day before, no one had too many clues though everyone wanted reforms. Some business types even conceded that the poor and less fortunate needed help while the economists looked askance at the idea. This continued till 11 am when everyone had to switch to the feed from the Lok Sabha channel.

     

    After that, it was a juggling act to get the best interpretation of the budget as it happened. I started with juggling between NDTV and NDTV Profit because the discussions headed by Prannoy Roy on one and Vikram Chandra on the other were interesting. But then they filled their screen with so much other information that I lost track of the “fin min” (oops).

     

    So I surfed till I reached CNNIBN which had the cleanest screen of the lot. No millions of shares going up and down, no “insta analysis” from experts as provided by Times Now and no tweets from the general public. Suddenly however CNNIBN started running a little cartoon man with placards saying “cool”, “good idea”, “bad idea” to several budget proposals which became a tad distracting. When I started spending more time figuring out if the cartoon man’s moustache changed position as he changed placard from cool to bad idea, I realised CNNIBN was also a bad idea and shifted to the Lok Sabha channel.

     

    I did surf through the business channels but not only were the screens cluttered with shares going up and down, they were also full of acronyms which I could not decipher. Seemed like maths class after some time – if you put the ELSS on the SME and divide it by the ECB you realise that the squaw on the hypotenuse is actually sleeping with the Big Chief. Or something like that but probably not as exciting.

     

    The speech took two hours, after which the viewer was exhausted but the analysts were chomping at the bit to take off and expound. The economists and journalists all hated the budget while the industrialists, bankers, investment and money people did not think it was so bad. It was clear that the journalists and economists were deeply hurt that Air India had not been sold, petrol prices had not been increased to Rs 150 a litre and even worse, so much money had been given to NREGA, rural and urban health and education and so on. Others talked about how “inclusive growth” was necessary in a politically correct manner, except for one man on one of the business channels who talked about “socialist stuff… health and all this blah blah”. One can only hope no one he knows ever has need of “blah blah”.

     

    As the evening progressed, Times Now looked at the politics of it and Headlines Today and NDTV went quite quickly into Sachin Tendulkar’s 100th century (glory be, at last, what a joyous day for Pranab Mukherjee). The business channels divided themselves us as some looked at property, others at investment and others at the stock market.

     

    Interviews with Pranab Mukherjee were shown on NDTV with Prannoy Roy and TN Ninan, on Times Now with Arnab Goswami and Navika Kumar, on CNBC with Raghav Bahl and on CNNIBN through Lok Sabha TV with a young man who Rajdeep Sardesai told us was a TV18 staffer. Whatever. Mukherjee’s famous temper was on display only with Raghav Bahl when he told him quite categorically that he was not going to get into a “school debate” with him. For all the posturing that the experts did on the other channels about the budget and the deficit and so on, only Bahl asked the really tough questions. Not that it came to anything.

     

    The verdict at the end: a choice between CNNIBN, NDTV for regular channels and Bloomberg and CNBC at the business end. The winner is possibly the remote, in that case.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    Freaking News: Tendulkar upstages the budget extravaganza

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Pranab Mukherjee owes a big debt to Sachin Tendulkar. By the time Saturday morning dawned, the newspapers it seemed were far more excited about the century of centuries than they were about fisccons, indirect taxation and how do you solve a problem like Mamata.

     

    The Times of India, Uttarakhand, had “Sachin, Thanks a Ton” as its lead headline and story. The budget was tucked below the fold. The Hindu went with convention and the budget, “Dr Pranab’s bitter medicine” but there was Sachin’s “century of centuries just below the fold. The Hindustan Times (Delhi) put Sachin as a banner on top of the budget – “God of All Things” and then said, “Reforms on Rewind”.

     

    The Times of India’s Mumbai edition put Sachin at the top and the bottom. There was the banner “Tondulkar goes where no one ever has or ever will”, then a graphicked-up finance minister with the headline, “Face it. Life’s got a lot more taxing” and then “Thanks a ton, Sachin” at the bottom. DNA, Mumbai went with “Budget bores, Sachin scores” which about put the matter in perspective.

     

    As far as headlines go, I would say Hindustan Times has won, DNA has come second, Times has tried too hard and Hindu not at all.

     

    Interestingly, Hindustan Times, Mumbai’s Sachin banner read “Man of the Century” which perhaps proves that HT thinks that either no one in Mumbai will get the Arundhati Roy reference in the “God of All Things” or that people in Mumbai can’t do maths (man of 100 centuries, surely?) or that the Mumbai edition just felt it had to be different from Delhi. Now that’s a legitimate desire, surely?

     

    Even The Economic Times could not ignore Sachin and tied the two together into one headline, “On Budget Day, Sachin scores”. The Vodafone tax case also got a cricket reference “Vodafone may have to face Pranab’s Doosra”.

     

    Thus the nation’s fascination with cricket and Tendulkar managed to upstage the annual extravaganza that newspapers go through every year.

     

    * * *

     

    In fact, Saturday must have been a news editor’s nightmare, trying to decide which story was bigger. After all, we’ve spent almost a year going on and on about Tendulkar’s 100th century and couldn’t give it second place even if it arrived on budget day.

     

    As for what the newspapers said about the budget, it was more of the same – some people liked it and some didn’t. More than likely: all will be forgotten as Mamata Banerjee plays out some new drama and Akhilesh Yadav loses some of his sheen. Pranab Mukherjee will probably have the last laugh.

     

  • Danish super-chef Rene Redzepi got a four-page spread in the same issue that aapro Narendra Modi got two, notes Ranjona Banerji in the 95th edition of Freaking News

    Freaking News: Much ado about Time’s Modi cover?

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Finally got my hands on the Time magazine featuring Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and all that springs to mind in Shakespeare. Much ado about nothing in fact. For all that Modi is on the cover, the text is a double spread. It appears to have been started when Modi was on his “Sadhbhavana mission” and contains some interaction between the writer, Jyoti Thottam, Time’s New Delhi correspondent, and him.

     

    What do we learn from it? That Modi is not remorseful about the 2002 riots, that he grew up as a pracharak, that industry in Gujarat is booming and that Muslims may not be better off in this state but they are certainly not worse off. Nothing that we did not already know. The hypothesis that Modi could be the next prime minister of India is tenuous at best – the article displays a very superficial interpretation of Indian politics and how it functions. The comparisons with Rahul Gandhi are specious and Modi did not campaign for the BJP in UP, we do not know how he would have affected the vote. The larger picture in which this profile is based is that the UPA is finished. Perhaps someone convinced Thottam that the BJP could win the next general election with Modi’s help?

     

    Why Time decided to run this story is what is interesting but since Time has done away with that little publisher’s note in the first few pages and no one seems to have asked them, we have no idea. Instead we have to wonder why Hindustan Times decided that the Time story was front-page worthy and why channels like NDTV thought the issue needed a debate.

     

    In any analysis, Time is will within its rights to do what it wants on its pages. Incidentally, Danish super-chef Rene Redzepi gets a four page spread in the same issue. Also, we are talking about the Asia edition of the newsmagazine, not the international or American editions. (Though according to comedian supreme Jon Stewart, the American edition of Time is most likely to have a cover story on whether pets like to wear matching clothes with their owners.) There is no significance to the timing – except that after the article appeared, the BJP lost a significant Lok Sabha by-election to the Congress in Gujarat.

    Enough said about nothing, I think.

     

    **

     

    The hysteria on TV over the allegations that two BJP MLAs were seen watching porn in the assembly by a senior journalist was vastly annoying and much less amusing than the jokes on twitter: “One Gujarat MLA to another: came cho?” (Thanks to Peter Griffin of Forbes).

     

    As usual TV lost the plot – the issue is about the appropriateness of watching porn in the legislature. Instead we went into screams and shouts about banning or legitimising pornography. Rahul Kanwal on Headlines Today though was quite sharp about stopping Shaina NC and Yatin Oza of the BJP making the debate about Narendra Modi!

     

    **

     

    Congratulations to CNN-IBN for being the most watched channel (it says) for the election results and the budget. They were certainly less annoying for most of the day on both days.

     

    **

     

    This bit is personal. When I complained a few months ago that Indian newspapers (particularly the Times of India) were not giving enough due to tennis star Roger Federer’s remarkable recovery after he won the yearender in London 2011, a young person commented (sounded young to me anyway) that Federer’s achievements were unremarkable or words to that effect. Now suddenly, according to the media, Indian and international, he’s the hottest thing on the tennis firmament and he’s everywhere.

     

    That’s vindication on two counts!!

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on primetime news and in the papers.

    [MJR] In which Justice Katju tells it like it is. Again

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Press Council of Indian chairman Markandey Katju has been one of the most vocal holders of this post, losing no opportunity to stand up for the media when required and to castigate it at other times. The trivialization of news remains a key issue with him and he has questioned once again whether our obsession with Sachin Tendulkar’s 100th century was justified. Interestingly, Tendulkar himself questioned it, pointing out that in the four matches when he got his 99th 100, no one mentioned it at all!

     

    Katju, speaking at the convocation ceremony of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in New Delhi (“over the weekend” says The Hindu in Monday’s paper) however saved his best for last, taking on Anna Hazare and his methods. While making it clear that corruption is a mega issue and that is why Hazare’s movement gained so much support, he questioned Hazare’s methods. “What is the rationale of the thinking of Anna Hazare? With due respect, I could not find any scientific ideas. These shoutings will not do anything.”

     

    Katju is a man who calls a spade a spade. Much as he rubbed most of the media the wrong way, there is perhaps some merit in taking some of his criticisms seriously. Is Aishwarya Rai’s pregnancy really front page news? Did the world end with Rahul Dravid’s retirement from cricket? There’s no point getting defensive here and saying, “The media has every right to choose its own stories”. Quite right it does. But does that mean that the media never makes mistakes? Or indeed, can one deny the dumbing down of the media in terms of choice of stories and understanding of news?

     

    **

     

    Talking about getting defensive, the editor in chief of this site Pradyuman Maheshwari faced some defensive posturing on the media’s role in the Norway-Bhattacharya child custody case on NDTV “over the weekend”. The anchor Sunetra Chaudhury, journalist Rashmi Saxena and former diplomat MK Bhadhrakumar staunchly held that the media had done no wrong. It was only when Maheshwari pointed out that no fact-checking had been done by the media and that the other side of the story was not presented – “a basic trait in journalism” – that the bluster of the others died down a bit and it was accepted that the media could have done more.

     

    Arrogance is all very well, but stupidity is just that.

     

    **

     

    This lack of perspective in the television media, especially when it comes to the armed forces, is equally appalling. It has the narrow-focused ability to only see every problem from the side of the armed forces. Yet surely we have seen, more so in recent times, highly ranked officers involved in the most reprehensible acts of corruption. In the current allegations made by chief of army staff VK Singh that he was offered a bribe by a former Lt-general, surely it would be better to get a few more facts on the case before having hissy fits in favour of every soldier ever accused of anything at prime time? At the very least it would be interesting to see if TV can seriously question what seems to be an obsession with attention as far as VK Singh is concerned. Also, at the risk of facing a firing squad at dawn, I would suggest that the media would be better served if it stopped treating the armed forces like a collection of overly-principled martyrs eschewing payment for their cause and just treat them with customary scepticism.

     

    **

     

    In an aside, how about TV channels hire some people with better spelling skills for their written portions? All morning on Monday I read about a “defemation vase” filed by Arun Jaitley against somebody. Of course, there are no bigger teasers than those little ticker tape thingies that run across the screen which promise so much and deliver so little.

     

    Twitter: @ranjona

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    Freaking News: Making sense of the army revelations

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Not surprisingly, the extraordinary revelations coming out of the army have consumed most of our days and nights. Kudos must go to DNA for first carrying the letter, which the army chief sent to the prime minister, about our lack of defence preparedness. Of course amidst all the high-decibel hot air about “high treason” and calls for sacking, we have as usual wandered into all kinds of marginal territories and taken a little time to put matters in perspective.

     

    Arnab Goswami on Times Now felt great shock that former prime minister Deve Gowda’s son Kumaraswamy said that arms dealers had tried to approach his father through him. Twitter took this as a joke with someone pointing out that Deve Gowda probably never took up the offer because he was asleep at the time. The innocence of television – is it endearing, annoying or just so put on?

     

    On NDTV and CNN-IBN, there were sometimes back to back discussions on the same subject with different anchors and guests. No great purpose was served by any of these – people who once wore uniforms claimed that the uniform-wearers were all purer than the driven snow, defence analyst Ajai Shukla said everyone always knew that India was badly prepared except probably Parliamentarians. Tarun Vijay of the BJP took great exception to being called ignorant but was told that he didn’t know what he was talking about for all his troubles. Brajesh Mishra felt that this government had spent too much money on development and “giving money to villages” and other unimportant stuff like that instead of presumably spending it all on national security. Luckily there was very little Chandan Mitra in all this.

     

    It, therefore, took the newspapers to explain to us the inner workings of the Tatra-Vectra-BEML deal, the connection between Ural trucks and army chief VK Singh and the problems with defence procurement. To be fair to Mishra however, he also said that the armed forces wasted time testing equipment in the snow, desert, mountains, plains, wind, water and so on till everything had become obsolete. All former uniform-wearers blamed the bureaucracy for the same.

     

    At the end of it all, you had to read the papers to find out who was who and who was doing what to who. This is a familiar pattern now and perhaps TV continues to be the saving grace for newspapers which have to make sense of the sound and fury. We now need some comprehensive stories on what appears to be some sort of internecine warfare within the army. It would also be good to know where the other service chiefs stand on all this.

     

    * * *

     

    As a break from all this, was the BRICS summit which just concluded in Delhi. TV did focus on that as well but sometimes when the reporters babble on and on saying the same thing in 16 different ways to guarantee their 2 minutes of air time, your eyes just glaze over. The business channels, however, had more focused coverage, including interviews with industrialists and so on. BBC and CNN were also more interested in the summit than in our military mis-manoeuvres.

     

    * * *

     

    A quick look at Pakistani papers this morning showed that in spite of all the fears of our former generals with moustaches quivering with rage, the Indian army’s lack of preparedness has not consumed them.

     

    * * *

     

    The Hindu has written a very welcome editorial, if a little late, slamming spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for his ridiculous comment that government schools are breeding Naxals. Does the media usually treat them too kindly?

     

    * * *

     

    The felicitation for Sachin Tendulkar by Mukesh Ambani provided the relief factor. TV, of course, pointed out that Bollywood attended in full force, leaving out the industrialists, politicians, artistes, literati and other movers and shakers in evidence. Where Bollywood ends, India ends I guess.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    [MJR] The big wound in Indian newsgathering covered with Kareena Kapoor’s bandaid

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Even three years ago, my father couldn’t tell the difference between Kareena Kapoor and Shah Rukh Khan, if he even knew who they were. Now he can recognise every single Bollywood star and can even talk knowledgeably about their new films and their goings-on. He has not watched a film, I must clarify, in I-don’t-know-how-many years. But he is a news junkie. Therefore, when he told me on Saturday that the biggest TV news of the day was that Kareena Kapoor had a band-aid on her leg, I believe him.

     

    I think I also take back every criticism of Markandey Katju I ever made. I opened the e-paper of The Times of India this morning, to have a look at what was happening in the world. The front page of the main edition and the front page of Bombay Times opened next to each other. I have not read Bombay Times since Medianet began, so I did not look further. Why should I, when I already knew from opening the TOI website that Sajid Khan thinks that the Shah Rukh Khan-Farah Khan fight was meaningless and that Sachin Tendulkar had handed over the captaincy of the Mumbai Indians to Harbhajan Singh.

     

    Actually, it said ‘Bhajji” but by now we all know who that is. Should they have called Sachin “Tendlya” to keep the casual tone consistent? Maybe you’re not allowed to get casual with Sachin.

     

    I then went to Google to have a look at Hindustan Times. “Click for the latest Bollywood and cricket news” said the link. Ah well. I already know that, I thought. Kareena Kapoor has a band-aid on her leg and Sachin is no longer captain of the Mumbai Indians. Of course I was wrong. The most viewed story on the Hindustan Times website is “Akshay Kumar, John Abraham in a brawl”.

     

    I had foolishly thought that the Myanmar elections and Aung San Suu Kyi’s imminent victory was big news but couldn’t find it on the home page of these two worthy websites.

     

    So I went to the Times Now website and that is where normal service was resumed. Arnab Goswami, in save-India mode, looked at me sternly and I then knew all about Jaganmohan Reddy’s yatra as the CBI noose around him tightened, the fact that Team Anna was now taking on the BJP over Himachal Pradesh and the Lok Ayukta Bill, that the prime minister had refused to meet army chief VK Singh. I also saw Mynmar there.

     

    I hereby humbly take back all the nasty things I have ever said about Indian television. This I predict will last three days. Because I just remembered Kareena Kapoor and her band-aid.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    For the 100th edition of Freaking News, some TV awards

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Outright, hands down, CNN-IBN wins the award for Silliest Debate Topic Ever On A Monday Night: “Is Yuvraj Singh the next Lance Armstrong?”. For those who have been living on Mars, cricketer Yuvraj Singh has been under treatment for cancer in the US and has just returned to India. A long recovery period lies ahead. Ace cyclist Lance Armstrong, a tour de force on the Tour de France, won his battle with cancer and didn’t let it affect his sporting prowess and achievements. Surely however, it is far too early to comment on Singh’s condition and future at all, although there must be every hope for a full recovery and return to form. Under the circumstances, this kind of discussion appears insensitive and illogical.

     

    * * *

     

    The Earnest Sadness In The Face of Terrible Facts award for Monday night goes to Arnab Goswami and Times Now on the discussion about a spurt in incidents of violence committed by teenagers. Goswami rued that the motto of “Simple living and high thinking” no longer made sense to the post-reforms generation and participants talked about how the drive for money and success had skewed values for young people. There was a pall of gloom all over the Times Now set as actors ruminated on the terrible effects of money and lack of supervision on young people. I had to use at least three hankies. Note to self: keep a box of tissues next to the television.

     

    * * *

     

    The award for showing Immense Fortitude In The Face Of Severe Provocation is shared jointly by Nidhi Razdan of NDTV and Sagorika Ghose of CNN-IBN as they attempted to control Trinamool whatever-he-is Derek O’Brien as he defended his Supreme Leader Mamata Banerjee from the wicked media. First on NDTV and then on CNN-IBN, O’Brien shouted, flustered and blustered his way through as he got angrier and angrier that anyone had dared to criticise his Supreme Leader. Razdan had him first and she barely managed to get him to stop talking so that the other guests could have their say.

     

    By the time he reached CNN-IBN, he had worked himself into a fine rage. He then “had words” with a CPI spokesperson which descended to phrases like “You are not the king of me” being bandied about. He then called Lord Meghnad Desai ‘Lord Swarj Paul” which led to another bout in which O’Brien emerged bloody. Then he and Desai got into another spat.

     

    All in all, Ghose was out-shouted and had to use her diplomatic skills (come on, we’re all born with them) to stop her guests from killing O’Brien. Even Dexter seemed kind and gentle after all this.

     

    * * *

     

    After all that, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central gets the award for Restoring Sanity to News Analysis as he took on the shooting of American teenager Trayvon Martin by a Neighbourhood Watch member George Zimmerman in Florida. Stewart asked all the questions that anyone following the case wants answers to.

    Phew.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    [MJR] Katju rides to the rescue of the press!

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Thursday/Friday was one of those rare news cycles where TV and print appeared to agree with each other – at least when it came to the Supreme Court’s upholding the Right to Education Act and the reservation of 25 per cent of seats for the economically backward in non-government schools.

     

    Arnab Goswami of Times Now right off the bat said any opposition was elitist and demonstrated the deep rich-poor chasm in this country. This line is in keeping with his “simple living high thinking” mantra unveiled a few days ago in a debate about teenage violence. Other channels also presented the same line of thinking. This made life a little uncomfortable for those outraged that rich kiddies now had to sit next to the children of their domestics – although no one said that quite so openly, of course.

     

    Even as opponents of the idea went on about increase in fees and so on, no one quite bought it.

     

    Friday morning’s newspapers followed the same lines – with particularly vociferous arguments in favour of the RTE plan and with some tough words for those against it. For a middle class readership, it is class prejudices which are first priority and the media has certainly picked up on that without pandering to it.

     

    As the judgment sinks in, it can only be hoped that newspapers (TV cannot do it) delve deeper into the implementation of the act and keep track of what is actually going on. Sticky points include minority institutions and boarding schools which are currently exempt from this provision, what happens to a child after Class VIII and improvement of facilities in government schools.

     

    * * *

     

    Press Council chairman Markandey Katju has jumped on to his white horse and charged to the rescue of the freedom of the press. The Press Council is going to the Supreme Court to challenge the Allahabad High Court’s decision to stop the media from reporting on troop movement. The media, so upset has it been with the temerity of the Indian Express to carry the controversial story about fears of an army coup in some government circles, has remained largely silent on the court decision.

     

    This is an interesting maturity test for the media. Its compulsions to tailor material to reader demands and provide infotainment aside, there is also a larger role regarding the safeguarding of democracy and being a general watchdog. Patriotism in the media context does not mean bowing before every institution – it means quite the opposite.

     

    I cannot say this better than Katju himself: “…the Indian Army is not a colonial army, but the army of the Indian people who pay taxes for the entire Indian defence budget. Hence the people of India have a right to know about army affairs, except where that may compromise national security.”

     

    As Katju points out, the media has this freedom under Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution.

     

    Hear hear!

     

    * * *

     

    The media’s role in the Aarushi Talwar murder investigation remains questionable. It has swung from one extreme to another, drawing its own conclusions, dramatising the life and death of the young girl and encouraging the investigators’ own bizarre behaviour as a result.

     

    Right now, some in the media seem to have decided that the parents of the girl are innocent and being unduly targeted. Open magazine has carried a long article by historian Patrick French claiming this (he is a patient of the dentist couple).

     

    Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the courts will base their judgment on evidence collected and presented.

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear every Tuesday and Friday, 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

    [MJR] Mamata’s antics dominate the news

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The strange doings of West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee continued to dominate print, TV and social media. The arrest of a Jadavpur university professor for forwarding a cartoon about her was compounded by news of another arrest of another professor for protesting on behalf of slum-dwellers in Kolkata. On Times Now, one lone “sort of” Trinamool Congress-Mamata Banerjee supporter said yes, but, maybe, should not, but. In print, edits and edit page pieces have consistently made fun of her and social media has of course been rife with criticism.

     

    It is also true that a lot of this anger is middle class rage which does not always translate but it is interesting nonetheless.

     

    Mumbai newspapers were not unnaturally taken up with Monday’s autorickshaw strike which crippled the suburbs. In the north, it was the chief ministers’ conference on matters of “federalism” and their general beefs with the Centre. Beef is the wrong – or is it right? – word to use here as a “beef-eating festival” organised by Dalit students at the university in Hyderabad has led to near-riot conditions with the right wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad objecting.

     

    The Taliban attack on Afghanistan was an important part of the news cycle. The last couple of weeks have been minus the sort of media hysteria which has gripped us recently. This means that news can get its normal play without being whipped up and re-packaged as end-of-the-world scenarios.

     

    * * *

     

    The murky underbelly of fixers and operators which trawl the paths of Mumbai’s hopeful newbies searching for money, fame and glamour has been exposed by the three murders currently in the newspapers. Intriguingly, the same people are somehow involved in three deaths or connected at any rate.

     

    Although the cases have got much coverage, thankfully the sort of breathless hysteria which has coloured cases like the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj murders or the J Dey murder-Jigna Vora arrest has been missing here.

     

    * * *

     

    It was a joy to read about Nari Contractor by Makaran Waingankar in Tuesday’s Times of India in what appears to be a nostalgia series called “Bombay Boys”. Made a change from the sniping and/or hagiography about current players practised by some young sports journalists these days!

     

    * * *

     

    Also interesting in TOI is an interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin about how apps are reducing web freedom! Since I am app-less am guessing I should celebrate my freedom!