|
Magazine
MEDIA MATTERS
News as spectacle
SEVANTI NINAN
|
With India becoming one of the largest markets for news, we are seeing many redefinitions of the product.
|
Photo: AP/ABU-DHABI TV
Changing definitions: A TV grab of live coverage of the Iraq War.
Headlines Today’s blah-blah-blah house advertisement turns criticism of frivolous news on its head. It lampoons those anchors and commentators who present and discuss serious news, showing them boring the wits out of a prostrate young viewer, l
istlessly flipping channels. And then proceeds to make a virtue out of what it has to offer. Not information, God forbid, but something guaranteed to make the young and listless sit up.
One evening last week that meant anchor Gaurav Sawant in a pink polka dotted tie offering excited commentary on something picked up from Canada — a magazine cover shoot gone awry, with a tiger on a leash lunging at a woman. On the evening bulletin they played the attack (playful, even if it broke ribs) some five times in two minutes. By prime time at night the looping of that scene had speeded up to nine times in about a minute. “Refreshingly different?” Yeah, right.
The same night, Star News was shedding crocodile tears for women whose boyfriends made blue films by filming them surreptitiously, while News 24 was living off the story of the Bangalore couple where the husband killed his allegedly unfaithful wife and committed suicide. Since all this was on the night of R K Sharma’s sentencing in the Shivani Bhatnagar case, we should be grateful that they weren’t harking back ad nauseam to that murder and reconstructing it for us.
A new culture
A new book, News as Entertainment, quotes Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein’s apt description of what he called a “sleazoid information culture”: “...we teach our readers and our viewers that trivial is significant, that the lurid and the loopy are more important than real news.” If that sounds like it was written to describe what we are witnessing in India, well, the book says that India is the world’s largest news market today with some 40 satellite news channels, who are inventive practitioners of infotainment.
Daya Kishan Thussu’s take on the rise of global infotainment chronicles what is now a worldwide phenomenon, with a chapter allotted to India and its devotion to the three Cs: cinema, crime and cricket. News as Entertainment maps the political, economic and technological context of this major change in the culture of news. The shift from public service to private television journalism in the post Cold War era comes from the impact of liberalisation and deregulation, including trans-national liberalisation promoted by the World Trade Organisation. The technological context is new communication technologies, satellites and digital broadcasting which have made the global expansion of news and current affairs channels possible.
The fount of infotainment (the word was to be found in Roget’s Thesaurus by 1992, says the author) is of course the United States with its merger of entertainment and information corporations and the resulting commercialism of television news. He describes the entertainment giant Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, MTV, Paramount Pictures as well as CBS News, as a “cradle-to-grave advertising depot” catering to all generations with its products. And then there is Murdoch and his Fox Network, whose sterling contribution to dumbing down, using live coverage of cricket to enter media markets worldwide, and selling war coverage as entertainment is duly documented. These are infotainment conglomerates that control both hardware and software, worldwide.
Blurring boundaries
Though it does not figure here, we are in the process of seeing the emergence of Indian infortainment conglomerates in UTV and Network 18, and in Anil Ambani’s growing media and entertainment empire. All three will produce and distribute everything from news to TV entertainment to movies in time to come. And doubtless, the distinctions between the three genres will become increasingly seamless.
And what does that do to how the viewer gets to see the world around him? We’ve already seen news channels in India dipping into movie clips to pad up coverage of events, and using actors to reconstruct crime stories. Thussu’s chapter on war and infotainment talks about the Fox-ification of war coverage, and it is worth harking back to on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. What you saw in the early days after 9/11 if you were a viewer of Fox News was a correspondent reporting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan like this: “We’ve been in various conflicts, and we’ve kept our chin up and kept focused on the fact that we want Osama bin Laden to end up either behind bars or six feet under or maybe just one foot under or maybe just a pile of ash you know. That’s it.” And the anchor adds, “All right. Well said, Geraldo.”
When the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, Fox News chose the Pentagon’s name for the invasion, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” as the tagline for its coverage, and instructed its reporters to refer to U.S. Marines as “sharp shooters” rather than “snipers”. Viewers evidently approved: Fox’s coverage got better ratings than the others, says Thussu. As Headlines Today will doubtless discover in its quest to be “refreshingly different”, once you’ve decided to dump the old norms of news reporting, the possibilities are endless.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
