Ranjona Banerji: Fly to Italy to run away from it all?​

​By Ranjona Banerji

What was the biggest news event this week? Come on, obviously it was the wedding of India’s cricket hero Virat Kohli and Bollywood actress Anoushka Sharma. They went to a foreign land, senior editors chased them all over the world (what a job, man and stolen from those who cover cinema for a living) and tracked them down to Italy where they looked all pretty in pink. I only know this, I confess, from hearsay evidence and from a photograph I saw on Twitter.

If I was a senior editor of a patriotic news channel and a man had been hacked to death for being a Muslim and the ​Prime ​Minister has accused a former ​Prime ​Minister of being a traitor, I would also fly to Italy to search for a cricketer and a film star. This would save me from getting involved in Indian politics and bombastically declare that anyone who is not a Narendra Modi fan is a Pakistani spy.

In some journalistic worlds, glamourous stuff like celebrity weddings is best left to people who cover it every day and who deserve a little treat. And in this case sports correspondents need to be in on the chase too. But there have always been those editors, even in print, who want to grab the shiny assignments for themselves. This is the best way to create resentment in the newsroom and guarantee that you do not build an effective second and third line of good journalists. If you have ever been unfortunate enough to watch a senior news anchor interview a celebrity, you know how gaga they are and how cringeworthy the whole exercise is.

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Okay, back to the rest of it. Although Mohammed Afrazul being hacked to death was shown on television, we must forget it as fast as possible because it shows the BJP, Hindutva bigots who have invented “love-jihad” and Rajasthan in bad light. Instead, we must allow Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to waffle on with any number of unchallenged excuses in defence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s allegations that Manmohan Singh colluded with Pakistan.

The glory of “false equivalences” is now embedded in Indian journalism and even very senior journalists will try and conflate two complete apposite ideas like a dinner party and the despicable polarising of Indian society, in order to be seen as “objective”.

The upshot however is that Modi has accused the Congress party of treason and has also made it clear that it is traitorous to imagine that a Muslim can ever became chief minister of an Indian state. This creates all kinds of horrors in the universe of Indian nationalistic journalism. Do they agree with Modi and continue with their obsession with Rahul Gandhi or do they fly to Italy? Well, duh. Though the implications of going to, “gasp”, Italy would not be lost on nationalistic minds, even as they munch on Jain pizzas.

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Meanwhile, stories have appeared with those complicated TV ranking calculations which imply that Republic TV’s rankings are falling in six major Indian cities. And, consequently, Times Now has “overtaken” it in viewership terms. As we know, there is no love lost between the two channels. But all this means is that the people who run Times Now (it is hard to call them journalists) have just become far worse than Republic TV. They have taken all Arnab Goswami’s antics and gone further with them. If a person so much as looks at a cow, Times Now will run a hashtag saying, “X wants to eat a steak and is anti-Hindu”.

Poor Goswami must be weeping. Does one feel sorry for him?

Indeed, the rumoured “decline” of Republic TV was inevitable since running a news channel is an expensive business. Instead, feel sorry for the people who watch Times Now.

​Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Consulting Editor, MxMIndia. The views here are personal​