A serious question but what was, we guess, a fun thing on two news channels (or perhaps more of them). Here’s Dr Bhaskar Das in the June 23 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on..
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Q. Last week, two Hindi news channels innovated with their reporting on the cyclone. One walking on the streets of an affected area and another in a helicopter, all from a studio of course. What’s your view: do these experiments dilute the credibility of news journalism, or all’s well for entertaining television?
A. First a disclaimer: I am not a news channel owner so all my perspectives would suffer from the infirmities of a layman.
Good journalists are expected to be cognitively more empowered than hoi polloi like us. And as an entrepreneur they know what keeps the cashbox ringing. You must be wondering about the divine responsibility of maintaining objectivity and gravitas of a news media organisation including news channels. But what do you expect when there is a plethora of purveyors of parity content or news. The number of channels in the news space is 400 so one has to stand out to gain attention, TRPs and accordingly advertising revenue – the holy grail of the economics of news channels.
To my first point is what the channel owners are doing and they should know what they are doing.
But is the audience/ viewer also unintelligent? If I paraphrase a cliche that every audience deserves the channel it gets, and sensationalism, dramatisation, overhyping improves the dopamine flow in the brain for the audience in general. Exciting content is in a sense the opiate of the masses (with apologies to Mr Karl Marx).
I am not a great consumer of news as I don’t spend much time on nice-to-know content. And of course being apolitical, I spend more time on academic content. In view of this, whether a news medium has gravitas and credibility or not, it doesn’t matter. As a discerning member of the group of audience, I have ways of crosschecking news that matters. People debate about polarised content, people debate about hyper-sensationalism… I wonder why. Because one has the choice not to consume content of a specific news brand. In a hyper-personalised environment, reading about universal gravitas and need for leader guarding the reader/ viewer is an anachronistic concept. So your concern doesn’t t concern me.