MEDIA MATTERS
Quiet behemoth
SEVANTI NINAN
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In the midst of all the eyeballs garnered by the private satellite channels, Doordarshan ambles along in its own ineffective way…
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Photo: Ramesh Sharma
Back in the fold: Government employees again.
On TV there is the daily high-pitched clamour of news television and then there is Doordarshan. It occupies so little mindspace that you tend to forget that all the others are noisy insects compared to this huge terrestrial behemoth. It employs far m
ore people than all of them put together, reaches corners of the country they never will, and quietly swallows up some Rs. 2,000 crore of public money every year. Its terrestrial and satellite arm, DD News, chugs along, changing its look every now and then to imitate its satellite competition a little more, and offering wall to wall coverage of what the government’s ministers and the ruling party chief did on a particular day.
Until some little story appears in the news to put DD back on your radar.
End of a pretence
Anand Sharma, who is officiating as Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, did Prasar Bharati a little favour last month. He put an end to the broadcaster’s 10-year pretence of autonomy and told its 38,000 employees that they would henceforth be on par with Central Government employees. All these years, most of them had been on deputation to the corporation, and therefore neither fish nor fowl where government perks where concerned. But now the UPA cabinet has resolved to end this uncertainty. It has chosen to bury the myth that Prasar Bharati is an autonomous public service broadcaster. The salary bills of its employees are paid for with public funds.
The corporation was notified in 1997. In the early years, the younger lot dreamt of functional autonomy but soon realised that it was destined to be a mirage. The Indian Information Service officers who run its news operation were also to be transferred from government to corporation. But Prasar Bharati must be one of the few notionally autonomous broadcasters in the world whose staff have been hankering to be declared government employees. Now that nobody is losing sarkari status except those hired after a cut off date in 2007, they can relax.
Civil society in India, which loses so much sleep over the likes of Rajat Sharma, Barkha Dutt and Arnab Goswami, abdicates when it comes to Doordarshan. It is the behenji on the block, it provokes nobody. So it gets away with more and more. The last time we lost our cool over what Doordarshan does was when it covered the Olympics. Its telecasts resulted in some gnashing of teeth. But thereafter nobody stopped to pay much attention to how much money it lost trying to cover the Games (it recovered only a third of what it spent) or on how unabashedly big its delegation to Beijing was (we sent more AIR and DD personnel than we did athletes). After all, they were going there at least partly to learn how to do the Commonwealth Games. Just as a 100-strong delegation went to Australia in 2006 so that they could learn how to cover the Commonwealth games.
So what did all of them learn? That it is wiser to outsource the actual job. As Prasar Bharati’s CEO B.S. Lalli puts it soothingly, it would be financially imprudent to attempt to acquire the equipment and expertise for a one-off event. The signals to be generated are high definition, we don’t do those. So PB put in a little ad in the newspapers inviting “expressions of interest” from those who actually want to cover the games for the host broadcaster and do the production and coverage. The viewer could be happy to hear that. Who wants more goofiness on air at the time of a big event?
So what do we look to DD for? Programmes for the masses except that TAM (television audience measurement), the accepted TV measurement currency, has trouble capturing these numbers when it does the “all TV homes” ratings, which cover both satellite and terrestrial viewership. For one week in January (18th to 20th) the highest rating for the National Networks in all TV homes using TAM figures was just five programmes over the week which got a rating of more than 3.00 TVRs. These fell in the category of talent shows or action serials. In satellite homes, says Mr. Lalli, DD has improved its ratings by five percent.
Happy days
As for DD News, the happiness channel, it rains smiles on you every time you tune in. India is smiling. Because the national rural employment guarantee programme is working, the drought prone area programme is working, farmers have shed the burden of their loans, the economy is looking up. A daily programme on DD tracks the economy for you, and scare mongering is not its mission. Presentable anchors, hired for DD News on contract by BECIL, another State corporation, ask careful questions of carefully chosen guests.
DD News’ censorship is so effortless that it goes unnoticed. Unless you are actually looking for a sober take on some bit of news that the others are hollering about. Last week it was the airport scare in Mumbai when an Air India plane had to grind to a halt because a helicopter from the President’s convoy had landed in its path. The other channels were dishing out graphics to show what a near miss it was. Doordarshan News at least for several hours after it happened, decided it had not happened. And if it figured at all in the main evening bulletin, it escaped me.
It is an election year, and the model code of conduct will come into effect some weeks from now. Until then you can get your fill of who is inaugurating what, and where on DD News, every day, every hour. Inconvenient news is glided over. But nobody seems to care. Not the Opposition, not us.
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