Contrary to kinetics, the couch potato’s life is fraught with nervous strife. The television viewer’s perception of India is being distorted in a mad race for TRP numbers.
Over seven crore Indians watch TV. Most are treated to a feast of blood and gore on news channels; as if all that happens around is murder and mayhem. In its cathode dementia, Dalits and Muslims are lynched in a loop by bloodthirsty vegetarians defending cows. A man’s daylight murder by a sword-wielding killer is prime time news.
Violence is what makes news in India today. Reporting is passé. The voyeuristic skills of anyone with a mobile phone and an internet connection can yield a ‘scoop’—why spend time and money covering a real story in these days of downloads? It’s Breaking News, buddy. YouTube is me-time for today’s TV journalist.
Then there is banshee hour; a gab-orgy of talking heads as pulchritudinous as mummified monkeys, possessing less taste than a frozen mushroom with the introspective skills of a sociopath on steroids. They speak authoritatively on everything from GST to Kashmir; frothing at the mouth, droning on in soporific monotones or exhibiting the nervous ticks of the small screen neophyte.
Switch channels and the same faces ponderously spout the same balderdash in a TV version of Dante’s circles of TRP Hell. It’s the ephemeral celebrity of mediocrity that news television celebrates, parading ‘experts’ as philosophers of panic, Neros of narrative and prurient Platos of parodies.
The picture is not complete without mentioning the hysterical hilarities in badly cut suits screaming at some hapless spokesperson or politician. Little twerps, just out of their diapers and minds, yelling ‘Apologise’!
News? Wazzat?
Television until today has not broken a story significant enough to shake up any government. In the 1980s, Indian Express brought down a prime minister with its Bofors corruption campaign. India Today magazine felled a government by scooping the Jain Commission report. Now, labels are bandied about with cavalier abandon—‘sympathiser’, ‘liar’, ‘traitor’... what happened to ol’ fashioned good taste and mature opinion? Instead of information, stories are being planted with frenzy as if horticulture is going out of fashion—‘First on Our Channel’—as if a few seconds in between beam times will dilute the effect of an incident. Planters have replaced sources.
And most stories seen on TV are broken by newspapers or magazines first.
What news consumers expect is information and considered opinion—context to understand the country and the times. News websites offer this aplenty, as well as newspapers. Television is in panic, losing its war against the social media. Its extinction is as inevitable as Jeff Bezos. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings believes broadcast and cable television will be dead in the next 20 years.
The rate at which technology is progressing, infotainment streams are converging on the smart phone. Apps are edging out linear TV. Unless TV reinvents itself as a credible source of news and views, the days of dressing up sensational social media as content will soon be its dog days.
You can’t hunt with Fox News and run with the hare-raisers and expect to be taken seriously.