By Shailesh Kapoor
The successful landing of Chandrayaan 3 on the surface of the moon has given our news channels, at least for a couple of days, a much-needed break from the pointless primetime communal politics we have now come to expect every night, across channels. The coverage of Chandrayaan 3 landing was not free of politics, and certainly not rooted in science either. But mercifully, the Hindu-Muslim narrative was kept aside.
The news genre has been under the scanner for the last five years, for various reasons. Reporting of news channel ratings has been a subject of perpetual debate, on topics as ranging from legitimacy of landing pages, to manipulation of ratings, to the evident political bias in favor of the ruling party at the Centre. A few key channels have withdrawn their audio watermark, in effect withdrawing from the ratings ecosystem. Demand to stop news ratings keeps gaining momentum every now and then. Despite BARC being an industry body, it has been difficult to drive consensus on these topics. And the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting always seems to be breathing down everyone’s necks in any case.
We are entering the year of General Elections soon. News channels look forward to it, because there’s significant advertiser interest in this period, and political advertising (though it has reduced on television in recent years) adds to the topline too. Absence of ratings can lead to a disruption that the category can do well without.
But at the root of a lot of issues plaguing the Indian television news genre is the larger question: Given its evident role in society and politics, can news be seen with the same lens as rest of the television? This debate is not India-specific. Globally too, including in the US, some of the biggest news channels have been under the scanner for their political dispositions, their tendency to peddle fake news to garner ratings, and for the absurdity of news reporting in general.
One school of thought would suggest that the free market should be left to decide the fate of all content, including news. And by implication, if audiences watch news for entertainment, so be it. Instinctively, this seems like a fair argument. But in a country where censorship and moral policing is incessantly irritating in the entertainment domain itself, this argument can be hypocritical. A regime that can ask OTT platforms to put a disclaimer on screen every time a character lights a cigarette, surely cannot turn a blind eye to news platforms shunning their social responsibility.
But we live in a confused and cluttered world, and it will be wishful to think that sanity is round the corner. As we get into the elections year, be prepared for more noise and vitriol than ever before. It’s par for the course, even if the course itself remains undefined.