MxMIndia

Tag: The News of The World

  • 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 news viewing can be injurious to the lower jaw

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Since president-elect Pranab Mukherjee spoke to almost everyone on Tuesday, it was hard to see why news channels rushed to qualify their interviews as “first” or “better” or whatever. Exclusive, in TV parlance, is apparently when you do the same thing as everyone else, except five minutes before.

     

    Anyway, Mukherjee did not say very much about anything he was going to do as President although he talked about his childhood and his early political career. The silliest question I reckon came from Sagorika Ghose of CNN-IBN who asked whether Mukherjee’s ascension to Rashtrapati Bhavan was a “return of Bengal to the mainstream”. At this point my jaw dropped so low that it fell off and I was so busy retrieving it that I couldn’t pay attention to the rest of the interview.

     

    The best I could get from Arnab Goswami’s interview with Mukherjee on Times Now was that first Mukherjee walked round his garden 40 times, then 33 times and now 30 times and he did not know how many times he was going to walk around the Mughal Gardens. He said he heard the gardens were very large. Anyway, as President he will have ample time to work out stuff like that. Or if he asks someone they might tell him how big the Mughal Gardens are.

     

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    Sunday was all about the presidential election as well as everyone gave us live coverage. Of course, after some time they ran out of things to say because there was very little to say about a presidential election in India, at least not enough that can last a whole day even given TV’s marvellous propensity for waffling on about nothing. The highlight of the day was losing candidate PA Sangma’s losing speech. He started by congratulating Mukherjee and then went into a whine about how the Congress had used bribery, extortion and threats to ensure Mukherjee’s victory and how the North East and betrayed not just him but all tribals and themselves as well. (They didn’t vote for him.) Sangma’s entire campaign was based on pettiness, so nothing surprising here. What was surprising was Navika Kumar of Times Now stating emphatically that this was the best, most gracious and most sportsmanlike speech she has ever heard from a loser. Her guests Krishna Prasad of Outlook and commentator NN Satchidanand tried to point out otherwise, but she would have none of it. Jaw-retrieval is a common affliction for those who watch too much TV news, as I should know by now.

     

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    Rupert Murdoch has stepped down from several boards which control News Corp’s titles in the US, UK and India. The pressure to do so apparently came from investors, after the phone-hacking scandal led to the closing of The News of the World and all the arrests of News Corp staff, current and former. Murdoch’s rise saw a lot of bile but in his fall are some abject lessons for media bosses and for those journalists who decide that principles are nothing when faced with corporate pressure to perform in a particular manner or to do anything to get results. The Nuremberg trials ought to be required reading for young aspiring journalists: the fact that you got an order is not defence enough.

     

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    I was appalled yesterday and continue to be appalled today about Monday’s front page anchor in The Times of India about a group of Indian athletes that went to the 1936 Berlin Games under a saffron flag singing Vande Mataram and impressed Adolf Hitler enough to give the group a medal. The story behaved as if getting a medal from the 20th century’s most frightening dictator was a great honour. There was not a squeak in the story about Nazism and what the organiser of the group thought of that. The glorification of Nazism in India is restricted to those influenced by the religious nationalism that comes of out of Nagpur. The story, therefore, should have mentioned or questioned the RSS connections of the group. Saffron flags and Vande Mataram were clear giveaways but why not come out openly and say so? And for a journalist – and a newspaper – to ignore the Nazi angle to such a story is criminal.

     

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    Vikram Doctor’s article in The Economic Times on food and the Olympics was extremely readable and well-researched. Try it: http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/onmyplate/entry/thanks-to-french-humour-here-s-best-of-british-food

     

     

     

  • In Freaking News, which will now appear 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

    Murdoch inquiry: the murky side of media highlighted

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    The questioning of Rupert and James Murdoch in the Leveson inquiry into media ethics in the UK was undoubtedly the highlight of this news week. Both the BBC and CNN showed major portions of the inquiry live and it was fascinating to watch these two very powerful men being closely questioned on their closeness to British politicians as well as on the way they ran their business.

     

    James Murdoch followed the line he had had at the earlier Parliamentary inquiry after the phone-hacking scandal broke which led to the closure of The News of The World: he remembered nothing. This is, even though he had been the recipient of a chain of emails which explained what was going on. Murdoch the younger claimed he had not read any of the emails.

     

    Two days were devoted to Rupert Murdoch who seemed far sharper than he had been during the Parliamentary inquiry. However, he also claimed to remember nothing, in spite of there being sufficient documentary evidence to prove his various meetings with various British prime ministers. Murdoch claimed that politicians always wanted to meet editors and proprietors but that did not mean that he wielded any influence.

     

    However, by the end of the second day of questioning, Murdoch admitted that there had been a cover-up of the practice of phone-hacking in his newspapers, which went at least up to the editor and beyond. He apologised and called it a failure.

     

    The venerable and respected Harold Evans, the one editor of the Times who Murdoch sacked, was scathing in his criticism of Murdoch’s testimony and his supposed inability to remember anything significant at all, in his piece in the Guardian on Thursday.

     

    In the backdrop of this questioning were the revelations that a close aide of British culture secretary Jeremy Hunt had been leaking secret information to the Murdoch organisations about the BSkyB deal, which has since been scuttled. But with both sides of the political spectrum in Britain being in the pockets of the Murdochs, finger-pointing is going to be a little difficult. In Prime Minister David Cameron’s favour is the fact that he commissioned this judicial inquiry.

     

    The parallels with India are fascinating, if at the least because media tycoons here remain shady figures, lurking in the background, pulling strings and manipulating policies. Also, despicable as phone-hacking was, it is hard to remember the last time any newspaper really spent any effort on news-gathering. We, in India, follow the other Murdoch model – use PR agencies to get everything done.

     

    Needless to say, Indian TV was not much taken with the Murdoch case, although newspapers gave it the mandatory space on their international pages.

     

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    The one story which got almost no space in the Indian media, in spite of the verdict being shown live on the BBC and CNN on Thursday, competing with Murdoch, was the trial of Charles Taylor. The former Liberian president was charged with war crimes for his role in the brutal and bloody war for power in the neighbouring Sierra Leone. Although the film Blood Diamonds got considerable media attention in India, the man who was part of that horror story, was obviously not worthy of too much space. For example, The Times of India had nothing, the Hindustan Times, a brief and The Indian Express a story on the international pages.

     

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    Instead the Indian media had absolute hysterics about Sachin Tendulkar accepting a nomination to the Rajya Sabha. One would imagine this was the first time anyone had ever accepted a Rajya Sabha nomination (12 distinguished persons are appointed every term) for all the hot air expended on TV. Newspapers also saw this as headline news.

     

    So far of course no one knows whether Tendulkar will be a good, bad or indifferent Parliamentarian. Therefore, tedious before-the-fact discussions and camera-inspired rage are pointless. Much time was spent on why Tendulkar was joining politics. It occurred to no one that being nominated to the Rajya Sabha is not “joining politics”. That would be when Tendulkar fights an election. Many nominated members gone back to their distinguished lives after their terms finished.

     

    The only benefit of such discussions is that you see just how stupid some people are.

     

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    Sometimes I find myself in full agreement with Press Council chairman Markandey Katju that 90 per cent of Indians are fools. And most of those fools find their way to TV studios.