MxMIndia

Tag: freaking news

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: Media forgets more than it remembers

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Most Indian newspapers stayed up late to bring readers the results of the Euro semi-final between Germany and Italy. The Times of India also managed to check up the Wimbledon scores and had a front page snippet on Rafael Nadal’s shocker of a second round exit. This is unusual because TOI usually does much less for tennis than other newspapers.

     

    (But CNN tennis reporter, I have a question for you: Is Rafael Nadal’s second round exit bigger than Pete Sampras’s fourth round exit in 2001, since you said that Nadal’s upset was the biggest in tennis history and no one could remember another? Nadal has two Wimbledon titles, Sampras at the time had seven Wimbledon titles – a record he holds with William Renshaw – and would never win another. The man Sampras lost to: Roger Federer. It was only 11 years ago, a little history is not a bad thing for a sports reporter. Or even, a good memory!)

     

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    The Houston Chronicle has fired a reporter for working as an exotic dancer (sometimes known as stripper) as a second job. The woman was exposed by a rival publication. Snitching on your competitors is a trend in Western journalism which is yet to reach India and one wonders whether that is not a good thing. The Guardian’s exposes of phone-hacking and other dubious practices by rival newspapers, especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch, perhaps fall in the realm of both public service and dogged investigative journalism. (The Hindu comes the closest in India, as it occasionally pulls up lesser media houses for journalistic and marketing transgressions.) But “investigating” fellow journalists of media houses and their personal lives to inform readers? Am not sure what category of journalism this falls into.

     

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    A minor storm in Indian journalism has been over the death of a photographer who worked with Tehelka, was sent into the hinterland to do a story on Naxals, got malaria there and died. The newspaper is at fault for apparently not factoring malaria into the threat element of this assignment.

     

    Newspapers in India are notorious for not being bothered about the dangers of newsgathering – mainly because most newspapers have dispensed with most kinds of dangerous reporting. (I could I suppose say the same thing about TV, in that they hardly started.) Gone are the days when even gossip columnists – like Devyani Chaubal being slapped by Dharmendra – faced physical dangers while working. I am being facetious I know but bullet-proof vests are hardly part of a reporter’s must-haves in India. There should be no room for callousness. But I am still unconvinced what Tehelka could have done about a mosquito. If they did not help the photographer or his family later, then there is cause for criticism.

     

    Still, it would not hurt media houses to take a closer look at employee welfare (this does not mean a box of mithai at Diwali) and on-the-job dangers.

     

    * * *

    Interesting that the anniversary of the Emergency came and went with little media attention. Are we moving on or did we just, like, forget?

     

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    The case of Abu Jundal or Jindal or Zaby or whatever his name is – the Lashkar handler of the 26/11 attacks sent to India by Saudi Arabia – is exciting but it is still in its early stages. Rather than focus their hysterics only on Pakistan, the Indian television media might like to look at it as a story first and probe all angles rather than jump into jingoistic propaganda.

     

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    The Indian media – particularly TV – got itself into a bit of a bind over Pakistan’s flip-flop over the release of Sarabjit Singh. Sarabjit is a celebrity prisoner whose family has ceaselessly campaigned for his release. Pakistan announced Sarabjit’s name and then changed it the next day to Surjeet Singh. Now the dilemma: should the media show happiness for Surjeet, rage against the machine for Sarabjit, damn Pakistan or blame Pakistan? Is one Indian equal to another or are famous Indians more equal? It is not known how hard Surjeet Singh’s family worked the media to get him released, so perhaps there’s an answer. Also Surjeet Singh walked across the Wagah border and claimed he was a RAW agent, a tag Sarabjit and his family have consistently denied!

     

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    Congratulations to Mid-Day on its 33rd anniversary and a whopping anniversary issue of 200 pages which I haven’t had the time to read yet. Might take me all week!.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: TV does right by Baby Mahi!

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Let’s cut TV news a little flak. What! Did I really just say that? The story of “baby Mahi” who fell into an abandoned borewell on her birthday last week but could not be rescued for almost five days is a made-for-TV story. Most newspapers would have reduced the story to a brief, if they carried it at all. Human life or in this unfortunate case death means very little in Indian newspapers unless it concerns high net worth individuals or happens in large numbers. Here also the concern is relative: for a Mumbai newspaper a bus that falls into a ravine and kills 50 of a marriage party in Bihar means less than an accident on the Mumbai-Pune expressway which kills 15. Geography and proximity carry more weight than the idea of death itself.

     

    TV news, however, challenges these assumptions made by the print media. While some may find TV’s attention to baby Mahi excessive or indeed point out that people fall into wells all the time, they are missing the point. Newspapers belong to the old, fatalistic India, where you took everything in your stride because life taught you that horrible things happen to everyone and especially to poor people. TV belongs to New India and as we learn every night, India always wants to know.

     

    And some questions, we must admit, need to be answered. There is no reason why people should regularly die because they accidentally fall into wells. There is no reason why we should not insist that safety protocols be put in place to prevent such accidents. There is no reason why local officials are not pulled up for being callous.

     

    Even if the hyperbole and hysteria generated by TV reporters and anchors can be vastly annoying, it does not mean that the reason they are having fits is not genuine. It took every bit of fortitude I could muster at midnight to listen to Arnab Goswami’s impassioned outburst against apathy and indifference (Wimbledon means I cannot get to TV news before midnight, yes I have no life and thank god I don’t watch football!) but behind all the bluster – there was a point.

     

    The trick for TV now is not to let this baby Mahi case turn into a real-life version of Peepli Live. They have to continue with the campaign they have begun so that they do not become as cynical as print journalists. It may be a tall order, but they started it.

     

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    I greatly admire Pakistanis who appear on Indian TV news discussions about terrorism. It takes great courage to withstand all that solid evidence against them and continue selling their government’s line. And they seem to be quite happy to do it. I do not get to watch Pak TV any more so I do not know if Indians appear on panel discussions to get pilloried. Does anyone know?

     

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    Football has taken over our newspapers. It is now emerging as cricket’s biggest competitor. We all know that Indian football does not generate any interest at all (somewhat like Indian hockey) but every FIFA tournament brings the lives of others to a standstill.

     

    The test I suppose is when cricket (with India playing) and football tournaments happen at the same time. Who do you think will win? Or will we then know whether sports pages are just lazy or have some top class brains involved in the planning?

     

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    The Times of India in its little debate section on the edit page has gone for and against on the use of the term “Bollywood”. It’s an old argument and an amusing one. We all know that the term is derogatory and was coined in the 1970s with that in mind. We also know that as long as the Hindi film industry continues to make song and dance potboilers, the term will continue to stick. No one calls Shyam Benegal or his oeuvre “Bollywood” so we all know the difference. TOI could have suggested options like “Goregaon”, since that’s where so many films are made and that’s how Hollywood got its name. Any takers?

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: TV lacks training to cover live events

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The fire which engulfed and destroyed large portions of Maharashtra’s most important government building on Thursday afternoon dominated news broadcasts and the newspapers on Friday – hardly surprisingly. TV channels switched from whatever they were covering – mainly the unseemly drama over India’s tennis stars and the Olympics to concentrate on the fire in Mumbai.

     

    It’s self-evident that TV is the best medium to cover live events. However, this is where lack of training – both anchors and reporters – gets exposed. Having shown viewers the fire over and over again – which really points to the camerapersons being able to locate the targets – TV reporters then appear to be at a loss. Instead of hundred several of them “standing by” at various locations around an incident, news channels might be better served if they trained some reporters to collect information while others dealt with on-camera duties. This way, viewers would get some news instead of having to hear: “The fire is still raging and as you can see people are waiting anxiously and if my cameraperson could show you…” over and over again.

     

    This is an aside: Instead of concentrating on emulating some fancy foreign accent, reporters who appear on English channels might spend more time on their grammar. A young girl on Times Now kept talking about the “backside of the building.” Backside however refers to the derriere, posterior, bottom, buttocks, bum – that is, the rear end of humans. She could have just said “back of the building”. This would not have been so jarring – or amusing – if she had not acquired an ambivalent pseudo-foreign accent.

     

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    Incidentally, local channels usually win at times like this and Times Now, being the only major English news channel located in Mumbai had the clear upper hand.

     

    * * *

     

    And the same can be said of The Times of India. For the past four years now, Mumbai’s largest English newspaper has been flexing its muscle when it comes to local coverage. With the Mantralaya fire, they covered just about every angle. Since they have employed a large proportion of the city’s reporters, they also benefited from the expertise their staff has picked up in other papers!

     

    In order, Mid-Day comes next and the tabloid newspaper has done a comprehensive and detailed job, then the Indian Express and finally, Hindustan Times. It is at moments like this that Hindustan Times seems to pay the price for concentrating more on packaging than substance. The Times of India has dispensed with packaging to provide material and this seems to be a winning strategy. Undoubtedly, a commendable achievement for a “product” from a group which is also responsible for some of the worst practices in the media today?

     

    “Sabotage” asked the Economic Times in a boxed item on their front page, thus emphasising the suspicions that almost everyone has about this fire.

     

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    Eminent heart specialist Ramakant Panda’s defence of the medical fraternity (obviously still feeling hurt by Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate) on Times of India’s edit page was not just weak, it was quite funny. Imagine using the incredible service provided by Prakash and Mandakini Amte to the tribals as an example of how great doctors are. If other doctors bothered to even do half of what the Amtes have managed for years, our healthcare to the poor would not be so despicable. Most doctors in Maharashtra however refuse to do their rural stint since it severely cuts into the ka-ching of big city cash registers. Please.

     

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    This is just a personal note. My rage against biased coverage of the tennis fiasco led one young (am assuming young from the way it was written and the handle Poopsonurface) person to call me a “Calcutta partisan presswalla”. Amused as I am, I must humbly declare that I have never worked in Calcutta or Kolkata in my career which spans almost 30 years. Other than Mumbai, the only other place I have worked in is Ahmedabad. As to his or her’s other suggestion that I “get a life”, I have taken that under advisement!

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: Media double faults in Paes-Bhupathi match

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    After years of working with city reporters, I accepted the fact that many grappled to understand the concept of “presumption of innocence”: If the police made an accusation against someone, why then it had to be true. But, of course, every accused has the right to defence. And while reporting a story, journalists are supposed to be objective. If they cannot provide both sides of a dispute, they must explain to the reader why they have failed.

     

    But in the initial rounds of this rather unfortunate fight in Indian tennis, where Mahesh Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna have refused to partner India’s top tennis player Leander Paes in the 2012 London Olympics, the media started out batting for Bhupathi alone. In what appears to be a well-thought-out campaign, the doubles pair of Bhupathi and Bopanna sent out a series of letters and emails signalling their refusal to play with Paes even before the All Indian Tennis Association decided on the Olympic team. Several newspapers and news channels did not even make a willy-nilly attempt to contact Paes.

     

    The exceptions are possibly DNA and Headlines Today, who got in touch with Paes’s father. But for the most part, it was about the terrible wrong that was about to be done to Bhupathi and Bopanna – being forced to play with Paes for the Olympics. Mail Today and The Times of India seemed like they had stakes in Bhupathi’s career.

     

    These pressure tactics appeared to have failed and the AITA decided to pair Bhupathi with Paes. This is where objectivity completely failed India’s sports journalists. Bhupathi came on air and was quoted in print making all kinds of allegations against Paes. The Times of India at last informed us that they could not contact Paes. Therefore, the story remained one-sided.

     

    Bhupathi and Bopanna meanwhile, perhaps emboldened by this out-and-out media support stated firmly that if either had to partner Paes, they were willing to forgo the Olympics. Despite the media’s usual pattern of extreme jingoism, even this display of lack of country love, did not deter the pro-Bhupathi-Bopanna journalists. One cannot state that sports journalists are less jingoistic than the rest – we see what they do to cricketers regularly. In fact I can guarantee that any top cricketer who refused to play for India because he did not like his team members would be hung, drawn and quartered by the media. By the way, cricket is not even an Olympic sport and technically, when Indian cricketers play, they represent the board. Not so for tennis, where professional players put aside career considerations to play Davis Cup and the Olympics.

     

    However, as the week of allegations by Bhupathi and Bopanna came to a close, the media slowly started to turn. Paes may have contributed to that by issuing a statement that he was willing to go by the AITA’s decision. The Indian Express and Mid-Day started to look at being fair to all concerned. The Hindustan Times later also presented a larger picture. The Times of India came to the party last – but more on its edit pages than its sports pages.

     

    Where a reader should have been given perspective on this battle and information to negotiate through this unseemly fight, he or she got a minefield of accusations from only one side. Now the villain of the piece is apparently the AITA as Bhupathi has approached the sports ministry to step in. Bhupathi has accused the selection committee of being a bunch of bureaucrats who know nothing about tennis. To me they appear to be former players – perhaps not of the stature of Bhupathi but tennis players nonetheless, a fact which needs to be pointed out in the media.

     

    Monday night saw Times Now’s Arnab Goswami ask Mahesh Bhupathi some tough questions – some of which he struggled to answer. This is the first time that Bhupathi’s accusations were questioned. Later, the fathers of Paes and Bhupathi were on Times Now, where Paes Senior pointed out that Bhupathi was not blameless in this battle, while Bhupathi Senior tried to shrug that off and say the Olympic riddle had to be solved not the mistakes made by the boys.

     

    Appalling as this ego battle between India’s top tennis players may be, the media’s partisan stand has been as appalling.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Ranjona Banerji: Is the media fickle, or just having fun

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Television is, of course, very worried about the next President of India, but newspapers have given it the treatment it deserved – reporting on the news rather than trying to create it.

     

    Which means that Friday morning saw the straining of the ties between the UPA and Trinamool Congress get full play in the papers, although Mamata Banerjee’s mocking of the prime minister seems to have got a muted response.

     

    There has been a distinct movement to belittle Manmohan Singh and the media now appears to have been taken along for the ride. It seems a bit odd that rather take a non-partisan stand, the media has been party to this campaign. Or maybe it is not odd and I am not surprised.

     

    The downside for Team Anna is that Mamata Banerjee has stolen their limelight. Of particular interest is her declaration in today’s Times of India that she is a “simple man”. Indeed.

     

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    Mumbai’s newspapers have focused this week on the extraordinary behaviour of the Mumbai police, with its raids on bars and restaurants and treatment of customers. On Thursday, The Times of India, Mid-Day and Hindustan Times dedicated pages to the police’s highhanded methods and its reliance on archaic laws to harass people. Vasant Dhoble, the assistant commissioner of police who conducted most of the raids, was also targeted. Pritish Nandy has written an impassioned article on the destruction of civil liberties in Mumbai over the years in TOI.

     

    Some of this concerted media focus has prodded the minister of state for home to ask the police to exercise some restraint. There has also been some discussion to re-look at all these old and pointless laws.

     

    Friday’s Mid-Day has a story on how the protests against Dhoble and the police which started on cyber space are now entering real life as well. And, according to the paper the city’s “young leaders” like Milind Deora and Poonam Mahajan have also asked the police not to harass the innocent.

     

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    The unfortunate ego battle between Indian tennis stars Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi has now got full media attention, especially as it affects India’s Olympic media chances. Here too, the media is divided between the two and as Bhupathi is better at building media relations, his case is being viewed with more sympathy. This is, in spite, of the fact that Bhupathi is the one putting up terms and conditions and refusing to play with Paes and also that Paes has bigger dibs on the Indian Olympic team because of his higher ranking.

     

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    The News Corp noose around British prime minister David Cameron gets closer and closer. Testifying in front of the Brian Leveson Inquiry into media ethics, Cameron tried to stand his ground that he had done no wrong but was hard-pressed to explain a text message from former News Corp CEP Rebekkah Brooks which said “we’re definitely in this together” just before the general election which the Conservative Party and Cameron won.

     

    The nexus between Britain’s political classes and the Murdoch organisation is no secret but its tentacles appear to have poisoned British polity, the establishment and the media itself.

     

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    Interesting to see after all the hoopla over former army chief VK Singh and all that bombastic media support, suddenly the media focus seems to have shifted to his detractors!

     

    Fickle or just having fun?

     

  • In Freaking News, which appears every Tuesday and Friday, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Troll travails thanks to Twitter

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Warren Buffett’s research has shown that while people may no longer read mainline newspapers, they are still loyal to their local community papers. Or at least that’s why Hathaway has invested in any number of community papers in the US but will not put money into the mainstream media. The same research also shows that people who do not buy mainline papers will read them online but not if they have to pay.

     

    This is a lesson about the internet that the traditional media in the west especially has yet to understand. In India, newspapers are free online but even they have irksome proceedings – like having to register to read the e-paper format like The Hindu. Others like Mail Today only have an e-paper format and no website which is also annoying.

     

    The freedom of the internet is what makes it appealing – even if no more than 200 people gathered to protest internet curbs – and this includes freedom from opening the wallet.

     

    The Huffington Post and Daily Beast both every effectively use social media like twitter and Facebook to push their stories – the Indian media is not quite so effective. Although Firstpost (web) and Mid-Day (paper) are not too bad and Firstpost also has the advantage of a fan base which retweets.

     

    The Times, London is a downer because it requires a one pound payment to open any story and the question is not of the amount so much as the procedure. This also stops The Times from reaching a wider audience as its stories cannot get picked up websites which collate news of a certain kind or allow readers to pass interesting articles along.

     

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    Until someone invents something better, Twitter remains the best disseminator of news as it happens. There are disadvantages, as passionately delineated by Namita Bhandare in the Hindustan Times (http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/SocialMedia-Updates/Running-away-from-the-trolls/SP-Article1-868619.aspx). Bhandare’s problem is mainly to do with the viciousness of internet trolls and she has clearly suffered. But of course it could be argued that the only reason that these “trolls” are so annoying/frightening is because of the enormous access that the internet provides. These “trolls” exist in real life also but we may not meet them that often. The internet cannot invent new ways of human behaviour.

     

    This response to Bhandare’s article by someone who calls himself a “troll” (aah, irony thou are not dead in India yet) is also illuminating  http://chamchaa.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/an-open-letter-to-namita-bhandare/.

     

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    From my personal experience as a columnist for many years I can safely say that people will insult you if they want via any medium of communication open to them. Twitter is just one more. I for one have got death threats, legal notices envelopes filled with talcum powder pretending to be anthrax and plenty of questions raised about the sexual habits of my ancestors and in the old days, all these came via the post office. So what, say I?

     

    Years of reading letters to the editor (in practically every publication I have been part of) has at least made me realise that people are dying to be heard and deeply resentful when their voices are blocked – or when they perceive it as such. Twitter gives them such a wonderful platform to vent and get rid off their frustrations. Worse than any “troll” remains the famous Mumbai postcard writer with the initials ‘MSK’ whose imagination and capacity for personal insults was prodigious. I believe he is no more and his loss is deeply felt. These are the people who make becoming a journalist worthwhile.

     

    Yes, there are offensive people on Twitter but one can either not encourage them or just shut them off!

     

  • Ranjona Banerji who comments on the fare on nightly news and the morning papers twice a week tells us why she loves Arnab Goswami so very, very much

    Ranjona Banerji: Why I criticise Times Now most

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Is the cacophony of television news adding anything substantial to the dissemination of news, views and information? In fact I should make that “substantive” since this seems to be the new fashionable word. I repeatedly hear people saying it on TV and since there is no editing provision for live TV debates, mistakes are exaggerated and emphasised. A man who was introduced as a Supreme Court lawyer (I cannot remember his name but he also hates the BCCI, if that’s a clue) said this repeatedly and I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall if he had ever appeared before Markandey Katju. Sadly, the print media is also unable to see the difference between “substantial” and “substantive” even as it continues to mis-spell “minuscule” as “miniscule”, probably because it doesn’t register on spell check in Microsoft Word. The dictionary has not been spotted in newspaper offices for over a decade now and sits high on the endangered species list. And of course the difference (or as they say on TV “differential”) between “less” and “lesser” is a lost cause as far as the print media is concerned.

     

    This segue from irrelevant debates to bad spelling is now over. This week, Times Now spent half an hour discussing a proposal by Air India to give special favours to MPs. The problem was that no one except the anchor, editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, knew anything about the plan. So the discussion – if it can be called that – never went anywhere.

     

    There are events which are offensive and annoying. But not all of them have enough substance – substantial or substantive – to merit a debate. A little discretion is advised if you do not want to drive viewers away.

     

    **

     

    I have to admit that I watch more Times Now at primetime than any other English TV news channel . And that is why I criticise it the most. But even in all the seemingly manufactured outrage, it appeared that Times Now had a finger on the pulse of its viewers. Now I wonder – drama for the sake of drama gets boring after a while, even in a country which thinks that Rowdy Rathore is a good film.

     

    CNN-IBN is dull, NDTV I have ambivalent feelings towards and I stopped watching Barkha Dutt after her reaction to the Radia tapes, Headlines Today remains a channel for babies and NewsX appears to have not paid its carriage fees to over half the country’s operators. The best programmes on CNN-IBN are probably Cyrus Broacha’s The Week That Wasn’t and Karan Thapar’s Devil’s Advocate and Last Word.

     

    **

     

    The problem for TV of course is that issues like the economy, drought, government inaction, female foeticide – which newspapers have focused on today – have no visual or dramatic traction. Indian TV news does not seem to have as yet worked out how to develop a story. If everything has to be breaking news, then at best you have raw data which can move in any direction and at worst, you have nothing.

     

    The Indonesian connection to Madhu Koda is a case in point. For such a story to have maximum impact, it would have made better sense for Times Now to construct a story and then air it. By just running with what they had, they only confused and bored people.

     

    This lack of direction and journalistic skill is why they keep running to people for reactions, whether it is a tree that has fallen or a road accident. Or indeed, a proposal by Air India to treat MPs like kings.

     

    Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. The views expressed here are her own.

     

     

  • While Ranjona Banerji commends The Times of India's for focusing on environment and getting Sunita Narain as guest ed, the stories were 'same old, same old'.

    Gimmicky, unappetizing green times

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    What is the general feeling on the pista-green shade adopted by Bennett Coleman newspapers for World Environment Day, June 5? To me, not only did it look unappetising (not that I have anything against pistachios, quite the contrary) but it also seemed gimmicky. The giant Fiama de Wills ad which ran horizontally from top to bottom and half the page on TOI did not help either.

     

    The effort has to be commended – Sunita Narain of Down to Earth as guest editor and a whole slew of stories on the environment. However, the kind of stories chosen were “same old, same old” and that, even for an interested party like me, it was a bit yawn-inducing. Wagging fingers about environmental degradation and human iniquity is now passé. The movement has progressed since then and practical applications and answers would have perhaps been a better track to follow. An opportunity lost, unfortunately.

     

    Most other newspapers just paid basic lip service to the day, so plaudits for Bennett Coleman there.

     

    **

     

    Sachin Tendulkar taking his Rajya Sabha oath should have been a fairly simple matter, with a requisite press presence suitable for a star. But this propensity for national hysteria can get a bit boring. Yes, we have already discussed in great detail the whys, wherefores, whens, hows, what-ifs and wisdom of this move. So apart from breathless coverage we also had some laboured debate on NDTV about Tendulkar and the Rajya Sabha.

     

    When there are no major issues at hand then TV’s desire for “scintillating” discussion (can’t find the sarcasm emoticon) falls a little flat. Even Arnab Goswami’s going round and round the mulberry bush over India against Corruption and Baba Ramdev’s on-off love affair was uninteresting since there were very few answers that India actually demanded from either of them.

     

    **

     

    Watching a press conference with Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee after the Congress Working Committee meeting on Monday was fascinating. If he were not so busy being the main trouble-shooter, the Congress could have used him as their chief TV debater. His breadth of knowledge is so large and understanding so acute, he sort of stops people in their tracks. I suspect that journalists are a little frightened of asking him the frivolous questions they usually do of others. Imagine what Mukherjee would do to Nirmala Seetharaman or Ravi Shankar Prasad in a TV debate?

     

    **

     

    Since the French Open is into its second week at Roland Garros, it is a pleasure to see so much coverage on so many sports pages. I take the Hindustan Times and the Hindu off the hook here – they have always given fair play to tennis. But even the Times of India which barely manages a nod to other tennis tournaments has clearly decided that a Grand Slam is worthy of its venerable attention. So too the Indian Express, which gives a little nod to sports and focuses on cricket, has been covering events in Paris.

     

    However the cynic in me says that since some European football tournament is due to start this week, tennis may soon be back in the briefs sections.

     

  • In Freaking News, which appears every Tuesday and Friday, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    Bandh a ‘partial success’, no effect on petrol prices

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Tracking Thursday’s Bharat Bandh protesting against the petrol price hike on TV led to a bit of confusion – was it a success or not. As it turned out, the Opposition-led bandh was what is known as a “partial success” so if you’re a half-glass pessimist, that’s the same as a “partial failure”. For Mumbai, TV showed us a bus in Mulund being attacked by a man in a BJP T-shirt – who either did not have the good sense or was just to brazen to hide his face from the camera. But social networking sites seemed to suggest that people did go to work. The morning papers said 60 per cent turn out in private offices and slightly more in government offices (really!). The commercial loss, said The Times of India, was Rs1,000 crore while Mid-Day pegged it at a more conservative Rs300 crore. Of course maybe with current rupee-dollar rate, both figures mean the same thing?

     

    There is also the other question about the loss caused by damage to property by “bandh” enforcers which as every newspaper painstakingly informed us, we the people would have to pay for.

     

    Across the country, the bandh fared better in some parts than others and apparently had no effect in Kerala at all.

     

    Petrol prices, by the way, had not come down by Friday morning at least.

     

    * * *

     

    As the TV news day progressed however, the bandh was sidelined first by BJP veteran LK Advani who announced in his blog that the BJP had made too many bad decisions recently and used the party’s favourite word “introspection”. This kind of took the wind out of the BJP’s sails as the main “bandh” caller. Immediate speculation began about a rift in the party – something political commentators have long known about. http://blog.lkadvani.in/blog-in-english/bjp-a-hub-of-hope

     

    Arnab Goswami interviewed Ram Jethamalani who had said similar things in a letter to Nitin Gadkari and Jethamalani was a hoot as always, even as he lost his ear pieces for a while and Goswami watched precious air time and money dribbling away.

     

    Jethamalani told Goswami he was a clever man who was trying to get Jethmalani round to Goswami’s opinion. Goswami said he had no opinion.

     

    No comment from me either.

     

    * * *

     

    The other big bandh spoiler was the Indian economy and the fall in GDP growth to 5.3 per cent, the lowest in nine years. Our TV newswallahs who usually shy away from the economy – possibly because they know so little about it – were forced to sit up and take notice and so gave us some uninformed guff, interspersed with a lot of dramatic music and stuff.

     

    Since the economic recession in the West in 2008, international TV newswallahs have become experts at this economy stuff and our TV people could learn from them how to use jargon effectively and impressively. Or, they could hire some journalists with a background in business and the economy. This would be particularly useful for the Sensex channels.

     

    Amartya Sen on NDTV sort of turned the argument on its head by saying that this obsession with GDP was misplaced. He started talking about inclusive growth and stuff which usually makes business people and economists turn faint from boredom as they cannot understand what that means.

     

    * * *

     

    At prime time, Headlines Today was still worried about cricket and Rahul Kanwal was in “hot pursuit” of Gautam Gambhir. Arnab Goswami asked why we need such bandhs at all and then proceeded to have a quarrel with Ravi Shankar Prasad about the NDA’s petrol policies.

     

    Mohandas Pai formerly of Infosys came up with a novel solution to bandhs – he said all bandh-callers should sit around statues of Mahatma Gandhi and hold hunger strikes. BJP people looked bewildered having never heard of this man nor seen statues of him anywhere in India.

     

    * * *

     

    Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi in Thursday’s Indian Express said, “Serious thought needs to be given to the ‘paid news’ that is threatening to erode the value and pride of the press and is starting to shake the foundations of democracy. A voluntary code would be the effective answer”.

     

    He was speaking at the annual convocation of the Express Institute of Media Studies.

     

  • In Freaking News, which appears every Tuesday and Friday, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    [MJR] TV gets boring after IPL

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The end of the IPL has seen a flurry of articles, analyses and edits – as well as some television breast-beating. Tuesday’s must-read is Ayaz Memon in The Times of India as he dissects the IPL and people’s reaction to it. TOI also carries an edit on the IPL – a day after everyone else.

     

    On TV, Rahul Kanwal of Headlines Today, wearing far too much make-up – almost like those pictures of stars like Rajendra Kumar and Biswajit with orange lipstick that movie halls used to carry – was in “hot pursuit” with BCCI chief TV spokesperson (if that’s not a designation it should be) Rajiv Shukla trying to solve all the problems with the IPL.

     

    The upheaval in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly also bothered our TVwallahs and led to one more verbal fisticuffs on Times Now. This followed another one on the Andhra High Court striking down a quota for minorities. One feels that TV channels need to stop inviting people like Ravi Shankar Prasad and Mohammed Owaisi on the same show as it only leads to acrimonious yelling rather than informed debate. Arnab Goswami did not even bother to control them. TV debates appear to have run through their usefulness. They provide little information or food for thought and now that the actors are the same on every channel night after night, there is no variety or novelty either.

     

    * * *

     

    The big news for newspapers in Mumbai was the horrific road accident on the Mumbai-Pune expressway where 27 members of a marriage party were crushed to death by a speeding truck. Several heart-wrenching details about the accident were in all the newspapers and were in fact almost too much to bear.

     

    The problems of no proper ambulance or paramedical services or the dangers of Indian roads and our lack of disaster preparedness were all covered. None of this makes the spectacle of accidental death any easier of course.

     

    The drought in Maharashtra is also now making almost a daily appearance in newspapers but I haven’t noticed it on TV yet. That is hardly surprising because unless there is mass-scale devastation, even 24 hour TV news channels struggling to fill in the gaps will not be interested. There is limited scope for engineered outrage and explosive TV debates when it comes to drought or even malnutrition.

     

    * * *

     

    The biggest media-related news was former British prime minister Tony Blair telling the Leveson inquiry into media ethics that politicians have to hobnob with the media in today’s world. He admitted to flying to Australia to convince Rupert Murdoch to support the Labour Party in the general elections. Interesting… Now how many Indian politicians would be so courteous to the Indian media?

     

    * * *

     

    On a personal note, was quite pleased to see the French Open get so much coverage in the newspapers. Of course, the IPL is over so there’s plenty of space… Hindustan Times gets top marks – but it has increasingly established itself as a newspaper which covers all sports not just cricket. Even the Times of India deigned to provide a little space to tennis and the Grand Slam which has just started in Paris. That is high honour indeed.

     

  • In Freaking News, which appears every Tuesday and Friday, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    [MJR] Media has to protect freedom of expression and thought

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The knee-jerk government response to the Ambedkar cartoon controversy – banning cartoons from text books – got a very strong response from Sunday’s newspapers. The need to protect freedom of speech, why cartoons frighten those in power, the personal attacks faced by cartoonists were covered by The Times of India, Indian Express and Hindustan Times in special features and detailed stories.

     

    Many also carried cartoons which have caused trouble in the past and tried to examine just why cartoons are seen as dangerous.

     

    Indian Express had a comprehensive interview with historian Mushir-ul-Hasan who has just written a book on Parsee Punch, a cartoon magazine brought out by Parsis in colonial India. The British in India at the time either had a good sense of humour or the good sense to realise that going after cartoons was hardly likely to end subversive thinking.

     

    The media has to come out and protect freedom of expression and thought – because in any battle against it, it will be the first casualty. The threat does not come just from those in power but also from pressure groups in civil society. Unfortunately in India, the first response by the government is to cave in to the demands of those whose “sentiments are hurt” rather than stand up for the Constitution.

     

    * * *

     

    After running through the IPL as the scourge of human civilisation, TV channels found something else to amuse themselves. Not, of course, the Indian economy, which seems perilously close to bad times ahead – there is after all little scope for a melodramatic studio-based jatra based on a falling rupee and rising inflation. Much better instead to concentrate on parties (not political ones, but the others where people gather to eat, drink and make merry and thus promote unconscionable evils), why the BCCI has insulted Kapil Dev by not giving him lots of money (and then providing the answer – because Dev hooked off to the rebel league ICL) and for all I know whether the sun will rise tomorrow or not.

     

    * * *

     

    It is always interesting to see journalists take the moral high ground when it comes to other people eating and drinking. Everyone knows that there are journalists who will do anything for a free meal and many attend press conferences only for the free drinks at the end. Even those who are not quite so greedy enjoy a drink or two at the end (or the middle) of a long and stressful working day. So why this moralistic posturing when it comes to others? Just to appeal to a puritanical audience or has alcohol dimmed their memories of their own excesses?

     

    In fine contrast, of course, the glamour sections of newspapers and glamour segments on news channels only serve to glorify the “having fun” lifestyle and employ almost no critical faculties at all.

     

    Just because the general public doesn’t know what you get up to in your spare time does not mean that you have to give in quite so much to hypocrisy.

     

    * * *

     

    Now that the Lokpal Bill has been put off till the next session, one can predict an all out publicity campaign by the Anna Hazare brigade – that’s easy. However, it is also possible to predict that while the movement may not fizzle out, the media coverage will.

  • In Freaking News, which appears every Tuesday and Friday, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare in the morning papers and the nightly news. And sometimes the afternooners, the newsmags and all that's on the Web

    [MJR] TV journos prove Katju is right

    Ranjona Banerji

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Journalists have evidently signed a pact to prove Press Council of India chairman Markandey Katju right – 90 per cent of Indians are idiots. There seems to be no other reason for this enormous media reaction to the late night fracas between film star Shah Rukh Khan and a security guard at Wankhede stadium two nights ago.

     

    Of course, the shenanigans of film stars are exciting and when they behave badly it’s even more fun. But is there anything to justify front page headlines and TV debates for two days? What exactly is there to debate? Khan arrived last the stadium around the time Kolkata beat Mumbai, with a bunch of kids. The kids ran into the field. A security guard stopped them. Khan intervened. Words were exchanged and some apparently not very polite ones and then Khan left.

     

    For this, the world has come to an end. We are discussing politeness, propriety, banning, apologies, role models, respect for the uniform, high-handedness, diplomacy, official inefficiency, entitlement or the sense thereof, protection of children and the decibel level of whistles.

     

    If we went to war with China, I cannot imagine more being discussed on television. The journalists on TV cannot seem to distinguish between a security guard and a policeman. Rahul Kanwal almost burst a blood vessel when on Headlines Today veteran adman Prahlad Kakkar tore into the behaviour of security guards: “You have to respect the uniform”. I would really like to know how any of these TV guests react when faced with the officiousness of a security guard.

     

    Kakkad was a rare voice of sanity as was Rohan Gavaskar who said: “Banning Shah Rukh Khan from Wankhede is like banning Sachin Tendulkar from PVR”. Meaningless, in other words. Except for Arun Lal on Times Now, no one wanted to discuss whether officials of the Mumbai Cricket Association, who called for a ban on Khan entering Wankhede, were not over-reacting. Lal said it’s a question of contesting fiefdoms – with Khan as an IPL team owner against MCA officials with their hurt pride at being event managers rather than stakeholders.

     

    The levels of self-righteous on Times Now were staggering, with anchor Arnab Goswami, veteran columnist and author Shobhaa De and not-so-veteran columnist Simi Chandok leading the way. Goswami kept bringing up police action against Hollywood stars Nicholas Cage and Russell Crowe, again unable to distinguish between security guard and a policeman. (Hint: different uniform.)

     

    Former Mumbai police commissioner MN Singh tried to point out that criminal charges against Khan were not possible and this led to him being dragged over hot coals by Goswami. When the nation wants to know, let no man or woman try and douse the fire.

     

    Commentator Charu Sharma however poured cold water on Rahul Kanwal’s spectacular rage – mainly it seemed because uniforms were not being respected, apparently a prime concern in his life – by forecasting that an amicable resolution would be reached and the incident would soon be forgotten. The truth is that everyone knows that that is what will happen.

     

    As a matter of interest, after all the hot air expended over the fight which Saif Ali Khan had in a restaurant at the Taj a few months ago, can anyone remember the names of those self-righteously hurt complainants from South Africa? Hmmm.

     

    * * *

     

    On NDTV, I watched another somewhat circular debate over whether PA Sangma could become the next president of India. These speculative discussion with weak premises only illustrate our emptiness of thought. I greatly admire Divya Marathi editor Kumar Ketkar for his fortitude and level of tolerance as he sits through so many TV debates these days, trying to inject a little sanity into proceedings.

     

    It seems amazing to me that no TV people seem able to realise that all this political hoopla over the next president is just a diversionary tactic from all the political problems this country is facing.

     

    Goswami even wants a debate between Sangma and Vice-President Hamid Ansari, since he possibly believes that India has a presidential form of government. Contestant 1: I will plant 400 varieties of roses in the gardens. Contestant 2: I will conduct the tours of Rashtrapati Bhavan myself. Contestant 3: I will never build a large retirement home for myself. Contestant 4: I will never bore school children with my poems and ideas.

     

    Please, somebody, save us!