MxMIndia

Tag: freaking news

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on nightly news and in the morning papers

    Freaking News: One event, two interpretations

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    One event, two interpretations: Monday morning’s Times of India and Hindustan Times had two completely different interpretations of LK Advani’s rath yatra’s entry into Gujarat. TOI found in an empty chair between Advani and Gujarat CM Narendra Modi a symbol of the growing distance between the two leaders and described their interaction as cold. Advani apparently added to the distance by praising Modi’s bete noire, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar. Hindustan Times however perhaps read nothing into empty chairs and said that Advani and Modi put up a united front to turn the heat against the Congress.

    Surprisingly, Headline Today, known for its slightly rightwing stance – No, Mr Katju, not all media outlets have identical reactions – also perceived a freeze in Advani-Modi relations.

     

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    Mamata Banerjee’s dramatic declaration – although her speech itself was very well-reasoned and delivered most matter-of-factly – of withdrawal of support to the UPA over the petrol price hike did not turn into a weekend drama. Mainly because the Congress barely responded and Banerjee herself said she would wait till the PM returned from his travels.

    It was interesting that Times Now broadcast her whole speech which was in Bengali and took a good few minutes to get translations up. Perhaps we need to have a more instant translation technique given the languages listed in the Constitution or at least faster paraphrasing abilities.

     

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    The death of composer and singer Bhupen Hazarika received both airtime and newsprint space and more importantly, honour and respect. Perhaps this means that we in the media are not as shallow as we ourselves feel or are made out to be – Mr Katju please note.

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    Our Sunday papers felt the need to reconnect us with the “other India’ and we had special reports on our labour policies and how unfair they are to labourers, the problems of contractual workers as well as focus on our perennial health problems. Not sure if this was proving a point to Mr Katju or in fact, it was the Katju effect at work.

     

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    Mumbai’s law and order problems were highlighted once again as the spotlight remained on the deaths of Keenan and Reuben in a Mumbai suburb in October. Most say this as an opportunity to focus on similar problems elsewhere in the country as well as on the treatment of women on our streets.

     

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    The Hindustan Times has been running a series of accusations and counterpoints between Goa theatre veteran Hartman de Souza and Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal which has now spilled over into cyber space. Tehelka has been holding a “Think Fest” in Goa and de Souza and others have accused the journal of having double standards when it comes to the issue of exposing the mining lobby in Goa. It is a fascinating series of accusations, some petty and some serious. This is one more example of how the media is looking more at itself as a “story” as well as how the internet has changed the game when it comes to public interaction.

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on nightly news and in the morning papers

    Amid firecrackers, the papers are quieter

    By Ranjona Banerji

    Although Mumbai is my normal hunting ground, I have spent this Diwali in Hyderabad. And it is wonderful how easily you can get into another news cycle, no matter how unfamiliar at first. There are no large well-packaged newspaper campaigns about roads or health or public transport. The outraged citizen is also more subdued than in Mumbai – Dear sir, I have not yet received my aadhaar card after so many reminders, gentle stuff like that.

    Politics is far more in evidence and clearly Tellywood has not overtaken every page of every newspaper the way Bollywood has done to our Mumbai papers. No one can suggest that the Telugu film industry is not huge and does not command a massive fan following or commercial presence. Yet, no film star has jumped out of the pages wishing us Happy Diwali, Halloween or anything else. Happy Days!

    Telengana is a big issue obviously, but everything has been a bit quieter over the holidays. Diwali-related allergies, pollution and injuries also got their fair share of attention, proving that social consciousness is a seller.

    Between the Times of India and Deccan Chronicle, the former is more national in its outlook and the latter more local. The day after the Metallica concert was cancelled in Gurgaon, TOI led with the story while DC was happy with a single column.

    The colour pages however are as full of the vacuous page 3 stuff and the scale varies, presumably depending on celebrity activity, which appears to have been quite slow. Or it could be that local celebs are not yet professional party goers who make deals with photographers to ensure themselves so many pics a week and all from the most flattering angle!

     

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    Not surprisingly, the Formula 1 race and the continuing travails and protestations of Team Anna hogged TV and newspaper headlines. The Big Fight on NDTV had a discussion on the corruption charges against Team Anna and its anti-Congress stand at Hisar, featuring former Delhi police commissioner Maxwell Pereira, actor Kabir Bedi, politician Renuka Chowdhury, former TOI editor Dileep Padgaonkar and a young girl from Team Anna. Anchor Vikram Chandra tried to ensure that Team Anna got fair treatment but even he was a bit stunned when Kabir Bedi said that he was not bothered by Kiran Bedi’s creative accounting. Audience members were far more critical.

     

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    The fiasco over the Metallica concert in Gurgaon demonstrated how TV needs to up its reporting skills. Anchors and reporters clearly did not have the wherewithal to probe what had gone wrong and relied on unsubstantiated claims made by fans. Oddly, TV channel websites appeared to have more clarity. It took the newspapers the next day to answer most questions. Yet, even now, the facts seem a little hazy, that is, juicy details of why the concert was not held are missing.

     

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    Most intriguing of all is the fate of some 130 tourists who have apparently been kidnapped in Lakshadweep. TV ran the story late one night and forgot about it the next morning. Newspapers have been silent and the web, normally a fount of information and misinformation both, has provided only sketchy details. So what’s happened to them?

     

  • Ranjona Banerji reviews nightly news and the morning papers in Freaking News

    The Empire seems to be wobbling other stuff standard

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    This is a mini review, as I look forward to the weekend and all the creativity which newshounds are forced to display. Cooking shows and endless movie stuff is the usual fare on TV, long features and short forays into the unusual are on the menu for newspapers.

    Meanwhile, the Times of India and Economic Times appear to have great glee in the Guardian expose on the Wall Street Journal’s dodgy circulation game – buying back unsold copies in some transatlantic transactions.  You have to feel sorry for Rupert Murdoch; the Empire seems to be wobbling. Perhaps India’s biggest newspaper group is sending a warning to NewsCorp with regards to its India intentions?

    The fact that Blackberry has started working again may end our global hysteria with different telephones and their features and failures. CNN however did put a hilarious clip about one of its staffers having a bit of a hissy fit on the stories they were missing because of the BB collapse at a news meeting.

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    The fact that members of the Sri Ram Sene or Sena and Bhagat Singh Kranti whatever beat up Anna Hazare supporters in Delhi seems to be a clear indication that they are looking for cheap publicity. But what a way to become famous!

     

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    The fact the Information and Broadcasting ministry has had to issue a clarification about its licence-cancelling law is only a minor victory. The battle to stop government control of the media has to continue.

     

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    There is a cricket match on today. Will the media turn all its attention there or will corruption, law and order, terrorist attacks continue to dominate? Hmmmm…

  • Ranjona Banerji reviews nightly news and the morning papers in Freaking News

    Time to take the government head on

    Ranjona Banerji

    Much as it was interesting to watch members of Team Anna squirming and dissembling to explain their foray into electoral politics on an anti-Congress campaign or hearing the speculation about whether LK Advani’s yatra is about him trying to become PM again, more attention needs to be paid to the government’s attempts to control the electronic media.
    Much as TV news channels can be annoying, irresponsible, depth-less and sometimes sense-less, they are an integral and important part of the media and have to be protected against government interference. The government would not dare to cancel newspaper registrations for five transgressions of some standards law; there is no reason why TV should be subjected to such harsh and illogical treatment.
    Both the print and broadcast media need to take the government head on. Since so much media dirty linen, soul-searching and hand-wringing is now done in public there is no reason why the public should be left out of this discussion. Do we need the government to control the media and decide on transgressions? Do we need better or more stringent internal control? How far does freedom of expression go (as far, it must be said, as various Indian laws allow)? Why aren’t FM radio channels allowed to carry news broadcasts? Do we want to go back to the days of an exclusive government-controlled broadcast media?  The media may be a pillar of democracy but it is not an organ of the government. It has to be independent and critical.
    It is imperative that these issues be discussed. The Times of India carries an edit on the subject but that is insufficient. There needs to be a larger debate.

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    The death of ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh – who had been in a critical state for two weeks – was covered comprehensively by both TV and print. Attempts were made to make the obits objective rather than merely hagiographic, which is amazing when you consider the completely adulatory writings which followed the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a man, it appears, who could do no wrong or at least be held accountable.

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    The Champions League came and went and almost passed under the radar. This is a new for cricket in India and it is probably down to fan fatigue, overkill and India’s miserable performance in the UK tour. At any rate, it proves that hype can only take you so far and sometimes, somewhere, reality sinks in. And apparently, no one cares.

  • Ranjona Banerji reviews nightly news and the morning papers in Freaking News

    So near, but yet so far

    In one of those delightful ironies which make life interesting, Karan Thapar’s The Last Word on CNNIBN featured three newspaper editors to discuss the question of whether the media did enough to get details about Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s illness.

    Here you had four journalists discussing “the media” as if it was some animal in a zoo, with whom they had only spectator contact. N Ram of the Hindu, Kumar Ketkar of Divya Marathi and Chandan Mitra of The Pioneer could not explain to us what their own newspapers had done to inform their readers about Gandhi’s mysterious illness. What is this “the media” they are talking about? The media is them.

    Instead they discussed a colonial hangover, the love or Jawaharlal Nehru, respecting laws of privacy, fear of Sonia Gandhi and a host of reasons for the media’s failure. This would have been okay if the panel was not made up of three working editors of three newspapers.

     

     

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    The television media’s insistence that J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah answer questions about the custodial death of a National Conference worker lead to a almost-funny situation where anchor extraordinaire, Arnab Goswami of Times Now, was rendered silent by Abdullah’s belligerence. As Goswami demanded answers (for the sake of India), Abdullah asked some pertinent questions about the way investigations are conducted in India, which left Goswami lost for words, looking down and away from the camera.

    Team Anna representative Kiran Bedi was in a similar situation on Times Now later when she could not answer a simple question from Kumar Ketkar: if Team Anna claimed that the whole country was with them why were they so frightened of getting a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament? Bedi had no answers for Ketkar or indeed for Goswami or the analysis put forward by Crest’s political editor Arati Jerath.

     

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    The lack of depth of TV is exposed again and again whenever there are no dramatic events to follow. Print journalists have to come to the rescue every time – whether on TV or in print – to provide perspective and analysis.

    This constant desire for drama and old-fashioned Indian style “jatra” at prime time sadly shows up TV on the slow days.

     

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    Newspapers are luckier of course because the front page presents whatever the editorial team considers to be the bog news of the day. It is a boon to decide what to choose when you don’t have to look for the loudest guests and try and save the nation at every given moment.

    The big problem for newspapers – especially in English – is the same one which irks Infosys mentor Narayana Murthy about the standard of students at IIT: bad English and bad grammar. Chetan Bhagat can perhaps get away with it, but newspapers should not.

    Examples of boo-boos big and small are welcome.

  • Ranjona Banerji's review nightly news on TV and the fare in the morning papers

    Freaking News | When newspapers twisted facts to suit themselves

    By Ranjona Banerji

    This weekend was dedicated to – surprisingly, not Mahatma Gandhi – but to the poor people of India. Of course this was a matter very close to Gandhi’s heart and perhaps more important to a commemoration of his 142th birth anniversary than cursory lip service paid to his legacy, as has become our wont.

    So TV channels and newspapers discussed the Planning Commission and its inexplicably odd expenditure cut-off of Rs 32 a day being above the poverty line in cities and Rs 26 a day in villages. As TV anchors, activists and the general public fretted and fumed, some analysts – in print and on screen — tried to explain it all statistically and economically to us idiots. Little of that was fully comprehensible and regardless of the contempt for a middle class which has only recently woken up to social issues, it goes without saying that the Planning Commission’s figures seem to be absurd.

    The imminent fall of the government continued to be a matter of discussion, especially for the BJP as the UPA scrambled to convince everyone that the dissent within them was normal and all was hunky-dory. But the BJP itself appeared to be a house divided with much speculation over Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s perceived snub to both the party headquarters as well as to party stalwart LK Advani.

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    Weekends on TV are usually news-free as news channels fill their space with car, food and Bollywood shows. We also occasionally get interviews with artists and writers. Presumably, this satisfies our need for culture, both popular and otherwise.

    International news channels however manage to slip in a bit of news as well, with the Eurozone crisis, the unrest in Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US economy and the US fight with Pakistan sharing space.

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    The fun quotient for the end-of-the-week as far as Indian newspapers were concerned was the release of readership figures for the quarter by the Indian Readership Survey. Every newspaper managed to twist the figures to suit themselves and this means that readers of multiple papers would have been in a state of happy confusion. In Mumbai for instance, both Hindustan Times and DNA claimed the number two spot, while the Times of India claimed number 1 for itself and number 2 for its free tabloid Mumbai Mirror. The figures support Mirror as 2 and Hindustan Times as 3, but then given that Mirror comes free with Times of India which has a huge lead over the others, this leads to a few questions. It also effectively puts DNA at either 3 (if you discount Mirror) or a distant 4. Mid-Day also saw a readership increase, bucking its own trend over the last couple of quarters.

    In Delhi, both Times and Hindustan Times claimed a rise in readership and the number 1 spot – or so it seemed to me. Across the country, this chest-thumping continued. I’m guessing readers know what they read and that advertisers will be suitably impressed – the whole point of this operation.

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    Am I the only one tired of every newspaper and news channels calling itself “your paper” and “your channel”? I “own” so many newspapers and channels now that am considering getting an investment consultant to cope!

  • We seem to be so wrung out and tired by recent events that even some T20 cricket tournament has not filled us with our normal passionate exuberance.

    Freaking News by Ranjona Banerji: Where’s the fizz gone?

    Life is dull, I have to admit, when television is not having hysterics about some issue or the other. And this week has been particularly short on made-for-television news events. I know I’ve grumbled about the neglect of subjects like the civil war in Libya or the collapse of the world economy but even I know that we cannot whip ourselves into a jingoistic frenzy with such sparse material to work on. No anchors foaming at the mouth, no calls for answers and no heartfelt pleas for justice, mercy or anything at all, nothing in fact that makes television news compete with the top general entertainment channels.

    So yes, the collapse of the world’s economy did make it to Indian television at last but that’s only after the Sensex fell at the end of last week and investors lost a notional amount that ran into lakhs of crores. By now we are so used to inflation and rising interest rates that no one can drum up even one fleck of hysterical foam at the mouth.

    In fact, we seem to be so wrung out and tired by recent events that even some T20 cricket tournament has not filled us with our normal passionate exuberance. We did try to drum up some enthusiasm for that mysterious note that one finance minister wrote to another former finance minister, something to do with the 2G scam, but no one knows enough about it and the people who know aren’t telling.

    Then Headlines Today, which is trying to steal the top patriotic channel slot from Times Now, did get quite excited about the current fight between the US and Pakistan but even that didn’t go far. Shoaib Akhtar, the Pakistani cricketer, said something about Sachin Tendulkar in his new book (yes, apparently he can write). But for all the patriotic fervour which we could have shown, the only people who managed to make something of it were some political parties in Maharashtra.

    CNN IBN remained steadfast in its coverage of the earthquake in Sikkim and its aftermath while by Monday morning, the floods in Orissa and Bihar were all over television.

    Talking about Pakistan, the BBC has a fascinating Hard Talk with Imran Khan, asking some very tough questions as usual and allowing the guest to answer them.

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    The newspapers, obviously, were in the same boat. They also realised that the world economy was in trouble. They managed to explain something of it, throwing the collapse of Greece into the mix as well. The unfortunate plane crash in Nepal got the front pages. Patriotism is everywhere so the Hindustan Times headlined the number of Indians who had died. Lesser mortals of other nations not so fortunate to be Indian also died.

    The weekend saw some newspapers telling us that Paris Hilton, general celeb and heiress of the eponymous hotel chain, was in town. The opinion pages were still obsessed with Narendra Modi and his prime ministerial ambitions and whatever else. Am not sure that anyone else still cares, especially since we are currently in this non-news cycle.

    This morning The Times of India came to me bright yellow as if it had been dipped in haldi and this made reading it very difficult.

     

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    I can only hope that things pick up as the week moves on.