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News channels this week: One Wedding & 13 Funerals
By Shailesh Kapoor
 The tragic clash of the Mi-17, in which 13 people, including the Chief of Defense Staff Bipin Rawat, died, has understandably dominated news headlines since Wednesday. The accident carries strong national importance, and the human stories around it makes the tragedy even more relevant for the general audience.
But that’s not how the week started for our news channels. They were gearing up for the Bollywood wedding of the year. Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal tied the knot yesterday. The private event at a luxury resort in Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan had seen the now-predictable news channels build-up since last week. Anchors in the studios, despite no access to the event, were ready to headline the wedding, and ‘reveal’ its intricate, even inconsequential, details to their viewers.
On Wednesday, that story took a backseat, with the Mi-17 crash being the dominant news. Through the afternoon, news was hard to come by, with no official announcements from the Government of India till later in the day. The coverage was passable, with news channels waiting for official Government sources to confirm the actual details.
Once Rawat’s death was officially confirmed, the coverage morphed into tributes, with some analysis of what may have led to the accident. The patriotic spin, something our news channels don’t like to miss out on these days, was easy to spot. A couple of Hindi channels even wondered if there was a “saaazish” involved.
A day later, i.e., Thursday, the anticipated wedding got muted coverage on some Hindi news channels, while the follow-up to the crash story continued. It would have been interesting to see how the channels would have made this choice if they had access to the wedding itself.
Which brings me to the larger point: Has our news become entirely studio-led now? Even in the Mi-17 crash coverage, ground reportage has been minimal (and restricted to off-prime hours), and most coverage has unfolded through studio shows, with anchors indulging in soliloquys, debates and expert interviews on the subject. In the wedding, that would have been the only method, because the only source of any “footage” is the social media feed of the couple. Indeed, those pictures, shared last night, are likely to be a part of our Hindi news channels, if not the English ones, through the day today.
In my growing-up years, the top news anchors of the time were always on the ground, reporting from there, cutting their teeth and getting us a good story. Over the years, the reporters on the ground have become nameless, faceless journalists, who seem interchangeable and replaceable. The sad part here is that this perception may actually be the truth. An Indian news channel doesn’t need the same firepower on the ground as it needed earlier. Basic reporting, with no insight most of the time, passes muster. Even during the second Covid wave, some of the best ground coverage came from BBC, CNN and digital news platforms like Mojo, or the Hindi newspapers. TV channels had cursory ground reports, and prime-time debates that generally were useless exercises in blame-game or pontification.
Judging basis the rock-bottom expectations we now have from our news channels, they have done well over the last two days. But at an absolute level, there isn’t much to write home about.
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Media responsibility missing in action
This absurdity of 24-hour “news” channels has been around India for ages to know what the rules of the game are, writes Ranjona Banerji
 By Ranjona Banerji
The terrible helicopter accident near Conoor which led to the deaths of 13 people in Conoor on December 8 shocked everyone. On board were Bipin Rawat, Chief of Defence Staff, his wife Madhulika, Brigadier LS Lidder, Lt Col Harjinder Singh, Squadron Leader K Singh, Naik Gursewak Singh, Naik Jitender Kumar, Naik Vivek Kumar, Naik B S Teja, Havaldar Satpal, the pilot Wing Commander Prithvi Singh Chauhan, JWO Das, JWO Pradeep A.
Group Captain Varun Singh is the sole survivor.
It took 20 minutes of reading through newspaper websites to get all the 13 names of the casualties. The Times of India was the one I found which had most names, but not all. I had to pick up three names from Twitter, from various ex-armed forces handles that I follow.
The death of CDS Rawat, 63, was a tremendous shock, there is no doubt about that. But the very least a responsible media can do is to at least acknowledge all those who died in the crash.
But media responsibility was missing in action when the news of the helicopter crash broke, especially with television news which is the first port of call for breaking news. Whether it is laziness and lack of basic journalism in television newsrooms (my hypothesis) or the various budget cuts which have led to ground reporting staff being hacked (people kinder than me), viewers get short-changed either way.
As an aside, budget cuts for newsgathering are not new in media houses. No one has had reporters, photographers, videographers everywhere for ages, if they ever did. But all newsrooms should have a network of agencies, freelancers, and local outlets that they can rely on.
As news of the helicopter crash broke however, you would have been hard pressed to find satisfactory on-the-ground reporting or even straight forward information on what exactly had happened. The nation’s first Chief of Defence staff being in a helicopter crash is big news. It is not enough to just focus on it. You need to have more information than anyone else.
Instead, our channels quickly sank into their fallback position: studio discussions. When an incident is unfolding, there is absolutely no sense in collecting a bunch of “experts” to speculate on what has happened. If you cannot go to the scene yourself, tie up with someone who is at the scene until your nearest people can get there. You see this happening all the time with international channels.
This absurdity of 24-hour “news” channels has been around India for ages to know what the rules of the game are. They know how tough it is. News doesn’t “break” nonstop for 24 hours. And yet, when something big does happen, less and less can they manage to get the basics right. Hopefully, they might junk the studio discussion if something happens outside their studio gates but don’t hold your breath on that either.
I am sure that television newsrooms are full of journalists who know how to do the job. I just wish there was more evidence of it. What seems evident from the outside is that whoever or whatever is in charge, does not know enough about the basics of journalism.
There is a place for opinions in a news outlet but it comes after the event. It cannot become the event. That TV has turned this axiom on its head points to the miserable state of the bulk of the Indian mainstream media today.
In case you think I’m being unfair, you will find that most of the subsequent coverage has been about famous people condoling the deaths, arriving at the funeral, getting out the car at the funeral and so on.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia every Tuesday and Friday. Her views here are personal |
