By Shailesh Kapoor
Less than two weeks ago, Bollywood heroine Sridevi passed away, leaving the film industry and her innumerable admirers in shock. Over the last decade or so, several film legends have passed away in India. But Sridevi’s death was different, in that she was only in her early 50s, and keeping perfectly good health too.
If how the media handled Bollywood deaths over the last decade was any indication, expecting any sensitivity in Sridevi’s case would have been out of question. Callous headlines, poorly-researched obituaries and loose analysis are par for the course. We saw that during the passing away of Rajesh Khanna, Shammi Kapoor, Yash Chopra, Vinod Khanna and Shashi Kapoor. The deaths were treated as some sort of concoction of breaking news and film gossip. They were “news eventsâ€, not just news. But this treatment was restricted largely to Hindi news
In Sridevi’s case, the media had a field day, once it was revealed that the death is not natural but accidental. Voyeuristic journalism came into the fore, with theories related to murder mystery and debauched celebrity lifestyles being covered with irresponsible ease. The English media, especially television, joined in with full gusto. Many channels likened the case to SunandaPushkar’s death. Theories and conjectures were floatedwithout any sense of proportions, and the flight of fantasy that some journalists took would make them worthy candidates to write a Bollywood script.
This period of two days ran in parallel with the Dubai authorities doing their regular procedures before handing over the actress’s body to her family. When that process was completed, the media quickly realized they had gone on a chase that led to nowhere. So, the “case was closedâ€, and the focus quickly shifted to “breaking news†from the airport, her residence and then the funeral venue. In all this, the big financial scam of the preceding week, involving Nirav Modi, became non-news in an instant.
Media frenzy was seen recently at the time of Jayalalithaa’s death too, as covered in an earlier column here. But Sridevi’s death took the callousness to another level altogether. Imagery associated with the coverage has done rounds of the social media, and most readers here would have seen the MautKa Bathtub graphic, the reporter in the tub moment, the ‘send white flowers to Sridevi’ viewer invitation, the collage of “drinking†images fromSridevi films, the sizing of the bathtub and more.
Much as social media came together to criticize the tone and tenor of electronic media’s coverage of Sridevi’s death, it doesn’t count for much. The truth is that there is a wide set of audience which finds all of this watchable. And till news media will continue to be judged and bought for its viewership, not much will change. If at all, the coverage of Sridevi’s death has set a new benchmark, which is now ready to be beaten.
Attempts have been made in the past to set editorial guidelines at an industry body level. But guidelines, by definition, are subjective in nature, and in a real-time, live scenario, they are hardly a factor. The only way out, if one was keen on finding one, has to come from the advertiser side. Most Indian news channels still rely primarily on advertising revenue, vis-à -vis subscription. And if the advertisers’ community comes together and decides to “approve†channels it will invest in, things can change overnight.
But would they be really doing that? Eyeballs are bought like commodities. And it’s as much a business as the business of “TRPs†is. So, while the media is directly callous, the buyer is implicitly so as well.
But if advertisers can take a wider, more responsible approach, they can fix things soon enough. Just a one-day token boycott of a news channel will send shivers down the entire industry’s spine. It can be done. But it needs the top 10 spenders to come together, which almost sounds like a flight of fantasy in itself.