Sorry of a News Media

Given my travel schedule, its difficult to track news from the beginning to the end. I mean a particular story, from the first time it is splashed as a breaking story, as it unfolds, till it eventually results in some common good. Well, that was the news of the old. Or supposedly. We always tend to compare our current state to a known state before. In that context it might appear that news was intended for common public good.

My last trip in India, i was fortunate, as it was an extended one, and this helped me to acclimatize to news media there. Not that they are foreign or different. Well, on second thoughts make that the first problem, they are not different. But that is topic for another discussion. This trip was also exceptional, from a news media standpoint, because we covered some major ups and downs. So one did get the feeling of watching the Iraq war live on TV. There was the outbreak of the CWG Scam, 2G scam, CWG Games, Ayodhya verdict, test match with australia, big boss, Obama’s visit, Karnataka Assembly, B’lore land scam, Rathore case and so many more.

My dth provides me with four english news channels, NDTV, CNN-IBN, Times Now and Headlines Today, apart from numerous hindi and other regional language news channels. For quite sometime, watching news has become more interesting than watching reality tv shows. I think i picked that habit from the US, during the Clinton time, following his public trial on news. So, while not averse to watching it, i am slowly weaning myself from this addiction.

The TV news channels in India during this period, rivaled each other to break the next story. Each claimed exclusivity on the story and or to the cast of actors. I did spend a few times flipping between the main english channels to see if anything more was revealed in another one. One of them in particular was so familial that they even called their channel as ‘Your Channel’. So night and day, they hopped from one story to another. Each day started afresh, because the current story was old and dead, and needed to be replaced with a new one.

And i found a new meaning for 24×7, like a day where the hours repeat twice, story and news repeats itself many times over during the day. After being first broken on TV, it is repeated in the closest news hour, by the next hour, there are few opinions from the near and dear, and by prime time, the experts are in from everywhere. So finally, you have Javed Akthar (poor man is not to be faulted, except for speaking), Jethmalani, Jayanthi Natarajan, Mani Shankar Iyer, Ravi Shankar Prasad, and a host of others talking about everything, anything and nothing.

The climax is the weekend specials, where they bring it all together. The fatigue is visible even on the newscaster and editors eyes, as they long to move on to the next story. And many times, that is the que to quickly wrap the current scam or a daily high and shift the focus to ‘developing story’. It is like a roller coaster ride, that is 2 mins of fun, that requires you to endure two hours of pain. In the end, the biggest casualty is the common good. All of this serves to educate us. But what good is an education, if you can not employ it anywhere.

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