MEDIA MATTERS
Eleven versions of the news
SEVANTI NINAN
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The business of news in a torrid 24-hour flow can get a little desperate at times.
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THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Shah Rukh Khan ...
WE live in an information economy and need news in a torrid, 24-hour flow, some 11 versions of it. Or do we?
Because the judge in his wisdom first deferred the judgment and then the sentence, I must have watched the "Tandoor murder case" recreated, smoke, charred remains and all, some 50 times at a conservative estimate. Daler Mehndi's turbaned passage to encounters with the law were also lived off cheerfully, several times a day, for several days. Stock footage is so handy in the 24-hour news business. Then they downed a helicopter in Iraq and gave all 11 news channels something to live off till the next day when there were bomb blasts in Baghdad.
In between there have been stories on mice taking over Kolkata (one housewife complaining, and several furry rodents photographed in one park), men wearing skirts in America, a pumpkin chucking contest, also in the United States, Aishwarya Rai turning 30, and Shah Rukh Khan turning 38. Hold your breath for that exclusive on the Prime Minister's dog turning nine.
The Reserve Bank's new governor temporarily turned into an unlikely star. Can you remember the last time the announcement of a mid-term credit policy became such a hyped-up event? If you have a 24-hour business news channel to feed, you can get a little desperate at times. The previous day, CNBC took a poll on how many percentage points the business community thought the bank rate would come down by. Then they got sundry CEOs on camera to react to the findings of the poll. The next day the policy announcement was scheduled for noon, but Lata was there at 9 a.m. telling Paromita that it was a windy day outside the RBI. Just for the record, the bank rate remained unchanged.
Then there is the small matter of expertise. Deepak Chaurasia, Doordarshan's trophy acquisition from Aaj Tak, might have made his reputation on breaking stories, but it strains credulity to digest him as the anchor of a discussion on credit policy. Not just him, all those teeny boppers on the other channels were popping questions on bank rates and cash reserve ratios fed to them through their ear phones. They get by because there is usually no time for follow-up questions. And it is not just the economy. On Aaj Tak I watched Vidya Charan Shukla pass for Shyama Charan Shukla. Nobody batted an eyelid.
Not that being a news warhorse helps. Larry King and his reporter were milking an abduction case in the U.S. for all it was worth. "When you look back at all this, what is your most vivid memory? What was a typical day like for you, an ordinary day in your daughter's absence? Your two daughters slept together. Did you hear any comments about that?"
PTI
Daler Mehndi ...
There are now more countdowns to the assembly elections than any sane democracy requires. There have been enough vote yatras, MLAs on the Mat, Singhasan ka Semi-finals, Aaj ka MLAs, and voters polls and accountability drills to wish that either elections or TV news channels had never been invented. Desperate inventiveness leads to circuses. Why would you have politicians grilled near a roundabout (Jaipur's statue circle), with the passing traffic to add to the cacophony?
Into this giddy arena of semi-literate colts has waddled in elephantine Doordarshan. Its anchors are not much wiser but they are older and wear normal clothes. Its chief virtue at the moment is that on it you are least likely to encounter advertising or in-house promos. And that it tells you several times over that the nation is on the move, mostly in Nellore, Bharatiya Janata Party president Venkaiah Naidu's constituency.
* * *
Two years ago, about this time, it was not Iraq that the U.S. was getting sucked into, but Afghanistan that it was bombing from above. The continuing Iraq story has pushed Afghanistan off the media's radar, but last week it came back into focus. CNN's woman for all seasons, Christiane Amanpour, descended on the country to report on how it teeters between disaster and hope, in a special report called "Afghanistan on the Brink".
AFP
... and Afghanistan ... discussed threadbare.
Amanpour is not self-effacing, she's always right there, bang in the middle of the story she is telling, dressed in colours calculated to make her stand out. More so against the bleak Afghanistan landscape. As we discovered when she came to Delhi not so long ago for a dowry story, someone is always standing by off camera to tend to her make up and hair. But she did a neat job of encapsulating what is at stake in Afghanistan and who is to blame. She is on record elsewhere damning the U.S. media for the way it reported the invasion on Iraq, so she took care to see that here no one could accuse her of the same kind of capitulation.
The U.S. came, bombed and went, and did not foot the bills for the damage done. Not enough, at any rate. It will take anything from $15 to 20 billions to rebuild the country and provide the security needed to save it from sliding back into terrorism. What the international community has coughed up so far is no more than $4.5 billions. The warlords are running the country, President Hamid Karzai does not run much more than Kabul. Reconstruction is not possible without security, but security, as she put it delicately, is a problem. Aid workers, road builders, all get attacked almost on a daily basis.
Though she did not deal with it, Afghanistan's media is also worth a story. An account by British journalist Stephen Carter on the Internet describes the flowering of media here, with precious little professional talent or resources. Hundreds of publications have begun to come out post-Taliban, but fearless journalism still requires a lot of courage. Neither the government nor the warlords tolerate much criticism or investigation, and while Amanpour's exchanges with Karzai are almost chummy (sample: "You're usually Mr. Nice Guy, what has changed?") a reporter for State-owned TV lost his job when he asked the President a question he did not like. He was reinstated, after protests.
In May this year, when the Kabul Weekly ran a story on the federalist ideas of the warlord Rashid Dostom, the subject was considered sensitive enough to merit a warning and threats of closure from the deputy information minister. Still, press freedom is rather better than it was under the Taliban.
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