MxMIndia

Tag: Jaipur Literary Fest

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

    Freaking News: It’s a dull year for TV

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The wonder that is TV news inIndiabecomes a total damp squib if there is nothing exciting happening. And this year has been particularly lacking news-wise. Or that is, news that suits TV land. Especially after the excitement of last year – not the least created by the anti-corruption movement – 2012 seems dull. The UP elections have not provided enough fodder and the best we have managed is the hullabaloo over Salman Rushdie and the Jaipur Literary Fest. The Supreme Court came down firmly on the age crisis faced by the army chief and that is now the end of that potential drama.

     

    It’s another matter that we have had sufficient news to keep us occupied. But when you run on a permanent cycle of “breaking news” which can be turned into hysterical studio debates, ordinary news does not suffice. Right now, the crisis within Kingfisher Airlines has the most potential.

     

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    Now that so many states have objected to the National Counter-Terrorism Centre, because it hurts our “federal structure”, it is perhaps time for newspapers to find commentators who can explain our “federal structure” in Constitutional terms. Are we really federal? Or is this just one more political ploy? In terms of law and order, the odd thing is that whenever something goes wrong in any state, people within and without the state clamour for a “CBI” probe. This, in spite of the fact that the CBI goes against our “federal structure” and at other times, is seen as a handmaiden of the ruling party at the Centre. It’s an odd but fascinating dichotomy of thought.

     

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    Yesterday’s newspapers told us that Anna Hazare is fit and raring to go. Today’s newspapers tell us that he and his team are due to meet. It would be interesting to see if television is still as accommodating to Hazare and his merry followers or whether they have fallen out of the news cycle. Newspapers, it must be admitted, have dismissed Hazare news to little single columns.

     

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    Having declared their “Aman Ki Asha” campaign for peace with Pakistan, the Times of India now looks east and introduces a “Bonding with Bangladesh” exercise. Since many Indians are even unaware that Bengal was partitioned (the general feeling appears to be that the only people affected were in north India), it will be interesting to see what kind of response they get. For now, it is sharing stories with the Bangladeshi paper Pratham Alo, to “deepen people-to-people” ties.

     

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

    Media frenzy over VK Singh’s age

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    On Monday night, I really thought the world had come to an end, what with India’s army chief suing the government over his date of birth. At least, that’s what I understood from Times Now, Newsx and a random sampling of Hindi channels. NDTV had move on to Pakistan to look at their own crisis, with the military playing its usually stellar role of villain cum hero.

     

    But by Tuesday morning, oddly, India was no longer at the brink of some terrible crisis. Yes, the army chief’s problems were headlined everywhere and while newspapers found his court action unprecedented, they were not concerned that India was at some crossroads or the other. The issue is undoubtedly serious but TV likes to see everything as a catastrophe or a victory and this attitude can cloud real issues.

     

    From my point of view, the big story was the ASER report about the tragic state of rural education in India (I confess that column for Mid-Day tomorrow is about this). The report made to the front pages of most newspapers but the attitude of the Times of India, I found most intriguing. A single column on page 1 spent half the space talking about how this report wasn’t the biggest as it claimed to be – as if that was the main point of the exercise. One inside report was about a possible education ombudsman and the other about enrolment of girls being up. Compared to this meagre sampling, DNA, Indian Express, Hindustan Times focused on the revelation that class 5 students cannot even read class 2 textbooks.

     

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    The Times of India was the only paper (only?) to carry the story of the possibility of writer Salman Rushdie not attending the Jaipur Literary Fest because of security concerns raised by the government after some hardline Muslim groups objected to his presence. TV is all over this story now and judging from the latest “source” news, the government may well be changing its mind.

     

    The lack of commitment to freedom of speech and expression from our government agencies remains a worry. The attempts to muzzle Google and Facebook have also got plenty of newspaper space.

     

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    The Indian Express had its fifth Ramnath Goenka Awards for journalistic Excellence in Delhi on Monday. Vice-president Hamid Ansari said that “watchdog journalism” is “vibrant journalism”. He also pointed to the more pertinent problem – that the slow corporatisation of the media has led to falling standards. “The slow erosion of the institution of the editor in Indian media organisations is a reality. When media space and media products are treated solely in terms of revenue maximisation strategies, editors end up giving way to marketing departments.”

     

    The cat is out of the bag as far as the media is concerned and we need to address this issue more seriously than we have so far, no matter how many EMIs will suffer as a result.

     

    Press council chairman Markandey Katju couldn’t resist a little dig about the poor intellectual level of most media people but that still is the lesser problem. Ansari’s diagnosis is more apt.

     

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    One suspects that MS Dhoni must be thanking army chief VK Singh for taking him off headline news!